A moderately effective treatment for ebola will come out of all of this.
There hasn't been a huge sum of money poured into ebola therapies, and we already have promising options. ZMapp or a similar treatment will be scaled up over time, and if ZMapp proves itself to work across a larger base of test patients, we'll simply begin keeping X doses available at all times to shut down ebola outbreaks in the future.
Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, during the relative early days. 23 years later, he's apparently very healthy. The first AIDS cases in the US were in the mid 1970s give or take, with the first recognized at the time to be in 1980. So 11 years after recognizing that first case, they were able to take someone like Johnson and keep him alive indefinitely with a virus that was thought to be a death sentence in 1991.
And that's all prior to having cracked the human genome, prior to understanding stem cells, and so on. So progress was naturally slower in the 1980s or 1991 than it is now. The biotech industry was nowhere near as large in 1980 or 1990 as it is now (Genentech having been founded just in 1976).
Ebola doesn't stand a chance, even though the short term will be scary.
There hasn't been a huge sum of money poured into ebola therapies, and we already have promising options. ZMapp or a similar treatment will be scaled up over time, and if ZMapp proves itself to work across a larger base of test patients, we'll simply begin keeping X doses available at all times to shut down ebola outbreaks in the future.