The outspoken health minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo has resigned in a turf war over vaccines being deployed to stem the Ebola outbreak which has killed more than 1,700 people.

"As a result of your decision to place the response to the Ebola outbreak under your direct supervision.. I hereby submit my resignation as health minister," wrote Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga in a resignation letter to President Felix Tshisekedi.  "As in any war, because that is what this is, there cannot be several centres of decision-making for risk of creating confusion."

Dr. Ilunga has held the job since January 2017 and has helmed the country's response to the Ebola outbreak since it was declared on 1 August 2018.  He has also strongly supported deploying an Ebola vaccine from the pharmaceutical company Merck, to fight the spread of the virus that's killed more than two-thirds of the people infected.  But recently he had opposed the use of a second experimental vaccine, this one by Johnson & Johnson.

"The (Merck) vaccine used in the context of this epidemic is the only one that has shown efficacy," Kalenga wrote, and it does so within 10 days.  "It is fantastical to think that the new vaccine being recommended (with two doses administered 56 days apart)..  could help control the epidemic that's underway," he added, alleging that the organizations pushing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine "lack ethics and are intentionally hiding important information from health authorities".  He didn't provide evidence backing up those charges, and the company says the new vaccine was successfully tested on 6,000 people.

But the groups calling for using the J&J vaccine are not to be taken lightly:  The US World Health Organization (WHO), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), The Wellcome Trust, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have been frustrated at the sidelines while 1.5 million available doses of the J&J vaccine were kept out of the DR Congo.

Ilunga also said it would have been confusing to the populace to use two different vaccines, but Johnson & Johnson said it was developed to complement the Merck medicine.  

President Tshisekedi has given direct supervision of the Ebola response to a team of experts under the direction of Jean Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, director-general of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research (NIBR) and a microbiologist at the University of Kinshasa’s medical school.  Dr. Tamfum has four decades of experience responding to the DR Congo's Ebola outbreaks.