WHO Recommends New Gates-Funded Polio Vaccine To Address Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreak In UK

WHO Recommends New Gates-Funded Polio Vaccine to Address Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreak in U.K.

Megan Redshaw

Health officials in the U.K. this month identified the country’s first polio outbreak in 40 years, and believe the outbreak was caused by a strain of polio found in the oral polio vaccine.

Health officials in Britain warned parents on June 22 to ensure their children have been vaccinated against polio after multiple closely related versions of the virus that cause the disease were found in sewage water at the London Beckton Sewage Treatment Works — the largest water treatment plant in the U.K.

“The Global Polio Laboratory Network has confirmed the isolation of type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV2) from environmental samples in London, United Kingdom, which were detected as part of ongoing disease surveillance,” the World Health Organization (WHO) states on its website.

The U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it believes the virus was “vaccine-derived,” meaning it came from someone who received the live polio vaccine. That person then passed the virus to individuals in London, who shed the virus into their feces.

The viruses’ genetic sequences suggest “there has been some spread between closely linked individuals in north and east London,” the UKHSA said.

The virus was isolated from environmental samples collected between February and May, and no related cases of paralysis have been detected, the WHO said. “Additional sewage samples collected upstream from the main waste-water treatment plant’s inlet are being analyzed.”

People vaccinated with the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) shed traces of the virus in their stool — which eventually end up in sewage wastewater, NPR reported. Scientists believe a person brought the virus into London and then spread it to others who were unvaccinated.

“We are urgently investigating to better understand the extent of this transmission,” Vanessa Saliba, an epidemiologist who consults for the UKHSA, said in the statement.

The risk to the general public is thought to be “extremely low” but the agency encourages anyone not fully vaccinated to receive a polio vaccine.

The WHO on Nov. 13, 2020, granted Emergency Use Listing (EUL) to a new novel oral polio vaccine called nOPV2, designed to treat the type of polio outbreak occurring in the U.K.

Based on the WHO’s review of data and research available on nOPV2, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) recommended Gates’ nOPV2 become the “vaccine of choice” for responding to type 2 polio outbreaks caused by OPV.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided 100% of the funding for the development and clinical trials of the vaccine.

“The emergency use listing, or EUL, is the first of its kind for a vaccine” designed to “pave the way for potential listing of COVID-19 vaccines,” the WHO said on its website.

The EUL is a regulatory pathway that allows the WHO — whose second-largest financial donor is the Gates Foundation — to distribute an unlicensed product for a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” which the organization claims polio has been since 2014.

The EUL allows vaccines and medicines to be made available more quickly to address health emergencies, without long-term phase 3 data, and is the same mechanism used for distribution of Zika, Ebola and COVID-19 vaccines

In addition to causing vaccine-associated paralytic polio, vaccine strains have the capacity to cause disease of the nervous system and to transmit from person to person resulting in infectious poliomyelitis.

Based on the WHO’s review of data and research available on nOPV2, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) recommended Gates’ nOPV2 become the “vaccine of choice” for responding to type 2 polio outbreaks caused by OPV.

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