The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) began an Ebola vaccination campaign on April 27 in the port city of Mbandaka in Equateur province, responding to a new outbreak that has claimed two lives since April 21. A ring vaccination approach will inoculate close contacts of confirmed Ebola patients as well as frontline and health workers, using an initial shipment of around 200 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV shot.
The DRC’s equatorial forests have been a hotbed of the Central African country’s Ebola crisis, with more than 2,000 people killed by the virus between 2018 and 2020. According to UN News, the latest outbreak indicates a “new strain of Ebola”—the result, WHO said, of a “spill-over event from the host or animal reservoir.” WHO AFRO; CNN; UN News