When the late Bob Simon interviewed Gary Kobinger for 60 Minutes in 2015, Kobinger was working principally in a space suit in a special clean room behind bulletproof glass. At the time, he was a top virologist at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab, where he became a critical player in the development of the early Ebola vaccine ZMapp. Now he’s the director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at the Université Laval in Quebec City, his hometown. His lab helped with the early development of Inovio Pharmaceuticals’ Zika vaccine in 2017.
Today, Kobinger is among hundreds of scientists worldwide working on potential Covid-19 vaccines; he is working with Inovio and Medicago, another drug company. WIRED talked with Kobinger by phone last week. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
WIRED: You’ve been watching and helping with epidemics your entire career. How does Covid-19 compare to, say, the Ebola epidemic?
GARY KOBINGER: Well, it’s on a global scale of course, so it’s more widespread than Ebola. But it’s also important to remember that this virus has a less than 5 percent fatality rate, versus 80 percent for Ebola before vaccines. [There were 28,652 Ebola cases during the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa and 11,310 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are more than 775,000 Covid-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. It has killed more than 37,000 people.]
But pandemics are so similar in the way societies respond. I went to many different countries in Africa because of Ebola outbreaks. And often we were accuse
