Why the two white Americans got the Ebola serum while hundreds of Africans were dying

After two missionaries were given an experimental treatment for Ebola, questions have swirled about why the hundreds of Africans infected aren’t getting it. For good reasons, it turns out.

A Washington Post blog asks: “Why do two white Americans get the Ebola serum while hundreds of Africans die?”
The New Republic demands: “Why did two U.S. missionaries get an Ebola serum while Africans are left to die?”

That was just media yammering, but it was echoed on streets and in subways by otherwise reasonable people. Never mind that there seem to have been no more than eight doses of the serum in existence. Never mind that the white people in question—Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—who received three of those doses before they were flown home to the U.S. got perilously ill in the first place because they risked their lives helping Ebola victims in Liberia who happened to be black. And never mind that Samaritan’s Purse would not have established the Ebola clinic in Monrovia and asked Brantly serve as medical director had it thought the life of a white American was worth more than the life of a black African.



If nationality and race did influence the organization’s decision to seek an untested serum for Brantly and Writebol, it was likely only because any Western organization that administers an untested serum to the African population runs the risk of being accused of using blacks as guinea pigs in the way of the long-ago Tuskegee syphilis tests and the 1996 meningitis tests in Nigeria.
That was not a worry with the two white Americans.

Of course, Samantha’s Purse may not have been immune from the sense of urgency that can seize even the most altruistic organizations when one of its own is in mortal danger. The same is true with a fire department when a firefighter is critically injured.



Watch what happens at the scene of a blaze when a radio call of “Mayday!” signals that a firefighter who went in to save others suddenly needs saving himself. This does not mean firefighters care any less about the people they are trying to save any more than it means Samaritan’s Purse was leaving Africans to die when it began asking U.S. scientists and health workers in the hot zone about experimental treatments described in various scientific papers in recent years. Samaritan’s Purse ended up in contact with Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego, the lead developer of a drug called ZMapp.



ZMapp is an enhanced version of MB-003, which was developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). MB-003 consists of three monoclonal — artificially produced — antibodies that proved capable of both deactivating the Ebola virus and tagging it for attack by the victim’s immune system.

A year ago this month, USAMRIID and Mapp announced the results of a study involving Rhesus monkeys that would have caused a sensation had we not been in a long lull between Ebola outbreaks. MB-003 protected 100 percent of the monkeys when administered an hour after exposure and two-thirds of those given the drug 48 hours after exposure.



“We were able to use MB-003 as a true therapeutic countermeasure,” USAMIID virologist Gene Olinger said when the results were announced.

James Pettitt, the study’s lead author, said he and his colleagues would be working with Canadian researchers who had devised a different antibody cocktail. The immediate aim would be to devise the most effective mixture of MB-003 and the Canadian compound and test it in additional monkeys, along with the best dose.



The combination was called ZMAPP. The ultimate results are said to have been even more promising than with MB-003 alone. But Ebola did not seem an imminent threat, and there was no scramble to produce more of the stuff than would be needed for animal toxicity testing and eventually the first human trials, which USAMIID expected to take between five to 10 years.