IPNews-Monrovia: Former Director General , National Public Health Institute of Liberia, and Time Magazine 2014 Persons of the Year, Dr. Mosoka P. Fallah, is lineup to speak at the prestigious London School of Economics alongside world leading scholars, including Dr. Robtel Pailey, on Global Health Security and COVID-19 Vaccines Administration
According to a dispatch from the United Kingdom, Dr. Mosoka Fllah, will be digging deep into the problematic and unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, including the lack of international responsibility in COV-19 Vaccine and its administration.
Dr. Mosoka P. Fallah is currently the Founder and Executive Director of Refuge Place International, an NGO aiming to address the issues of access to quality affordable health care that impacts maternal and infant mortality among poor urban and rural dwellers in Liberia.
Dr. Mosoka Fallah has a PhD in Immunology from the University of Kentucky and he has studied Global Health and Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.
Currently, Mosoka is the Principal Investigator in Liberia of several NIH-sponsored studies on Ebola, including a natural history study of the largest cohort of Ebola survivors in the world. In addition, Mosoka serves as a part-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. In June of 2019, he visited the Democratic Republic of Congo as a part of a team of local NGO and York University in Canada to evaluate and advise on the Ebola response. For his work building community-level trust in the Ebola response, Mosoka was named a Time Magazine Persons of the Year in 2014.
Last month Dr. Mosoka Fallah, wrote a journal titled ‘Paradox of Geography and Vaccine: When the Constructs of Global Health Security and Vaccines as a Global Good are Abandoned’.
The Journal highlights the excitement by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, IFRC and MSF and other international health organizations on the establishment of a global Ebola vaccine stockpile”, by the “International Coordinating Group (ICG) on Vaccine Provision”, with financial support from GAVI, and the Vaccine Alliance.
The journal detail the success of the research, development, manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, with the sole intend to addressing Ebola outbreak anywhere in the world within 48 hours under the right environmental conditions for quick containment.
It may be recalled Liberia, and other countries in 2014/2015, experienced the devastating effects of the Ebola epidemic which brought the complete collapse of the health systems leaving particularly the sprawled of dead bodies in the streets of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The article further detail how the world has not revealed the sacrifices made by African scientists in the long journey from the phase two clinical trials in Liberia to ring-vaccination in Guinea.
“It masks the story of the thousands of West African volunteers who took the risk to be tested with one of the two Ebola vaccine candidates in 2015.”
“Like many other Africans, I have been involved with the Merck, Sharp & Dohme (MSD) single-dose Ebola (rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP, live) vaccine from pre-trials up to the current decision for the vaccine stockpile under the ICG. It has been a long arduous journey to overcome the initial hesitancy and resistance of communities in the region. These initial efforts, however, had resulted in the first large scale Phase-2 randomized control clinical trial of two Ebola vaccine candidates in Liberia. One thousand five hundred participants in Liberia were recruited into either of the two vaccine candidates or the placebo control arm. The result of that vaccine impacted the initiation of the ring vaccine in Guinea and its eventual use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2017, I was invited to Geneva by WHO to attend a special session convened by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization. The combination of data we presented on the leading candidate of the Ebola vaccine (rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP) phase-2 trial along with other expert opinion led the SAGE group to approve this single vaccine candidate as a part of the 2018-2020 Ebola virus response in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).”
“Many African scientists were asked by MERCK to serve on the Experts’ Input Forum on Ebola vaccine. There were many of us from Africa including Professor Jean Jacque Muyembe, co-discoverer of the Ebola virus. Our inputs informed regulatory, licensure and post-licensure processes. Key among these issues was the stockpiling for immediate distribution to countries facing Ebola outbreaks. The final decision to have the MERCK Ebola Vaccine stockpile managed by the ICG had taken three years. I was there with my colleagues assisting every step of the way. Both the volunteers who received this experimental vaccine as well as those of us who supported the process have never asked for special privileges or priority in the stockpile and the distribution of the single-dose Ebola vaccine (rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP).”
Get Detail: http://www.independentprobe.com/the-paradox-of-geography-and-vaccine-when-the-constructs-of-global-health-security-and-vaccines-as-a-global-good-are-abandoned/
