Esther only winces slightly when a doctor on Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) vaccination team injects the Ebola vaccine called rVSV-ZEBOV into her left upper arm in Kimbangu, a community in the southwest of Beni--one of the recurring hotspots of the current Ebola epidemic in North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Justin*, her two-and-a-half year-old son, bursts into tears when he sees a new syringe being filled, and only calms down a few minutes after receiving his shot. The vaccine feels painful in their arms, but side effects are mostly mild and early results show the vaccine provides effective protection for a promising 95 percent of participants after ten days.
For more than a year, the outbreak response has been in full swing in the city. On site since the early days of the epidemic, the international medical humanitarian organization, MSF, has recently started supporting vaccination activities in Beni as it is a promising tool in the fight against the deadly virus. Yet reaching the right people in a timely manner is a complex endeavor.
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