The Storm We Chose: Bundibugyo Virus, Preparedness Injustice, and the Pathogens We Decline to Fight.

Abstract

The 2026 Ebola disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is caused by Bundibugyo virus, a species for which, unlike Zaire ebolavirus, no licensed vaccine and no approved therapeutic exist. This commentary argues that this absence is not a misfortune of virology but a structurally produced injustice. Bundibugyo virus has been characterised since 2008, has caused lethal outbreaks, and was foreseeably capable of recurrence; more importantly, species-specific and cross-protective countermeasures were scientifically tractable more than a decade before, yet none reached licensure or field readiness. A recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus vaccine expressing the Bundibugyo glycoprotein - built on the same platform as the licensed Zaire vaccine - conferred complete protection in nonhuman primates in 2013; thirteen years later, no clinical-grade material existed when the outbreak began. The gap, we argue, lay not in what science could build but in what the system chose to finish, because preparedness investment concentrated on the species that threatened wealthier and more connected populations. Drawing on the framework of structural injustice and on the authors' prior field experience of concurrent epidemics in the DRC, we distinguish tragic scarcity from produced scarcity, answer the feasibility objection, and argue that closing the gap is an obligation rather than a charity.