A Global Plan to Defend Against the Future's Deadliest Diseases

The closing days of 2016 brought great news: The world now has an Ebola vaccine that’s 100 percent effective at preventing infections from the strain behind the recent west African outbreak.

But that vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV, was actually created back in 2003, and first tested in monkeys in 2005. Then, it just sat in a freezer. It stalled because developing vaccines is incredibly expensive. It can cost up to $1 billion to test them in large clinical trials, and to build the manufacturing facilities needed to make them. Pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to recoup that investment, especially when it comes to diseases like Ebola, which are rare and tend to hit poor countries.

So, when news broke of the Ebola outbreak in March 2014, at least seven potential