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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It might burn itself out, which is as bad as it sounds - it will kill so many people there will be no one left to infect.

There will probably be mandatory quarantine as well, and everyone inside the zone will either die or become immune.

Or we might figure out how to manufacture the 2 or 3 known cures in great enough quantity.

Or a vaccine - seems to me this should not be a huge challenge to develop a vaccine for because (unlike HIV) people become immune after exposure, which is half the battle already.

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A vaccine is defiantly the way to go, but do we have the infrastructure (or will) to produce a vaccine in the quantities required? The progress towards a vaccine seems to be rather lackadaisical given the scale of the problem.

I bet we will see things speeding up as we get more "patient zero" episodes in developed countries, putting pressure on Western governments who will, in turn, pressure the pharmaceutical industry.

I'd go out on a limb and say that this would have happened already, if it weren't for the fact that the "avian flu" fiasco / profiteering is still very fresh in people's minds.

The problem is you can’t just click your fingers and suddenly have a new vaccine on demand. We have yet to have even stage 1 testing of any candidate vaccine for Ebola. Once we have a vaccine we need to produce millions of doses and then distribute it in countries with no functioning health infrastructure. And we need to get all this done in a couple of months!

There is already a functional system for distributing basic vaccines across the world, reaching 80% of babies.

It would not be difficult to distribute the vaccine, and we don't have to get everyone - we just have to get the viral rate below 1.

This system was not set up from scratch in a couple of months. I think you are underestimating the difficult of distributing a vaccine we don't have in west Africa once the case numbers there reaches into the millions.

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