THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Well, not as most people imagine that to mean. In the world of developing safe vaccines it is, metaphorically speaking. T make a safe and effective vaccine takes much more than a simple "Aha!" in a lab.

Dr. Ripley Ballou, head of Ebola research for Great Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, told the BBC that full data on a vaccine’s safety and efficacy won’t be ready until late 2015, and full-scale production for general use won’t happen until well into 2016.

The World Health Organization had said a month ago that it hoped data from clinical trials on two vaccines would be available by next month, and the vaccines would be available for use by health care workers by January.

GlaxoSmithKline’s Ebola CAd3 vaccine was one of the two vaccines. The other was the VSV vaccine, made by NewLink Genetics Corp., which is headquartered in Ames, Iowa. The GlaxoSmithKline vaccine has been developed in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Ballou’s assessment alarmed experts at the the medical charity Doctors without Borders, which has more than 3,000 staff members fighting the epidemic in the three most affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The organization, at least 16 of whose workers have contracted the disease, urged GlaxoSmithKline to step up its efforts.

“This is a disaster scenario,” the organization’s executive director for drug access, Manica Balasegaram, told McClatchy. “We want to see serious acceleration. We need to be more ambitious. It’s worrying to hear timelines into 2016. We have got to accelerate. The situation on the ground is a catastrophe.”

He said Doctors Without Borders has 60 centers in the affected countries, and so far it had treated more than 4,500 victims.

Catherine Hartley, a GlaxoSmithKline spokewoman, told McClatchy the drug company is working as fast as it can. She said the company already has begun manufacturing 10,000 doses of the vaccine so that it can move quickly to the second stage of clinical trials if the first ones are successful. Information on those first-phase trials will be available early next year.

First you have to make sure it doesn't give the recipient Ebola, then you have to make sure it prevents serious infection upon exposure. And each step requires time that can not begin until sufficient vaccine is created. And it may well not work perfectly so you need to see what didn't work. All of this usually takes years so a prediction of vaccine by 2016 is lightning fast for the pharmaceutical world. And for too many it will never be fast enough.