Why it has taken so long for pharmaceutical companies to make a vaccine or drugs to fight the Ebola Virus?

Nobody seemed to care if Africans living in some of the poorest nations in the world were dying from a virus spread by eating monkeys. It got attention when the virus changed and started spreading from human to human. This change in the virus meant that the virus could spread beyond West Africa and even become a global pandemic. That got everyone's attention. .

Governments sat by and watched the ebola virus turn into a crisis when they could have acted instead. If world governments had pooled their resources before the virus began spreading from human to human they might have developed a vaccine in time to prevent the outbreaks that occurred. Andy's explanation of economics is why corporations did not act, but governments could have easily changed the economics by funding corporations to develop a vaccine.

The problem with making a vaccine for Ebola is that it was generally restricted to small areas and burned it's self out before causing too much of a problem. So up until 10 years ago, it didn't seem like too much of a threat to the general population to invest money in making a vaccine for it. However about 10 years ago there was an outbreak in the Congo. They realized a large part of the problem in dealing with Ebola is that the caretakers tended to contract it so they were afraid to help people. So in this case, the Canadian government started work on a vaccine. A prototype vaccine (VSV-EBOV) was created in Canada in 2009, but they didn't have the funding at the time to finish with trials to certify it's safety and effectiveness, so it was shelved at the time. When the outbreak hit West Africa in 2013, a whole lot of money quickly became available and the shelved vaccine was brought back to active research. Canada didn't have the facilities to quickly certify the vaccine so they licensed the vaccine to NewLink Genetics who gave right to Merck & Co. to make the vaccine. NewLink got the final trial underway and Merck finished the trial and got the vaccine certified in 2015 for emergency use in case of another outbreak. So we now have an Ebola vaccine.

Not enough characters here to teach you economics, so I'll simplify.

A company must develop and research a vaccine or drug and this costs money.

Companies exist to make money.

So there must be demand for the product so they can recuperate their costs.

Ebola simply doesn't affect enough people yet to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

Economics are not a invention of mankind; it is simply how the natural world works.