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Commercial rights to a vaccine worth $50 million were sold to a U.S. middleman for $205,000.

The strange case of Canada’s Ebola vaccine became even stranger Monday.

That’s when the pharmaceutical multinational Merck announced it will pay $50 million for commercial rights to manufacture and develop the vaccine, invented at the federal government’s National Microbiological Laboratory in Winnipeg.

That a drug giant would shell out $50 million is not in itself peculiar. At a time when the rich world is close to panicking over Ebola, there are only two experimental vaccines aimed at the virus. Canada’s VSV-EBOV is one of them.

Europe and America have belatedly come to realize that Ebola is not just an African disease.

What is odd, however, is that the money goes not to the Canadian publicly owned entity that developed the vaccine but to a small U.S. middleman that appears to have done little.

Iowa-based NewLink Genetics has had the exclusive commercial licensing rights over the Canadian vaccine since it bought them from the Public Health Agency of Canada in 2010.

In return for those rights, according to the filings the company made with U.S. regulators, NewLink provided the Canadian government with a “milestone payment” of just $205,000.

That’s considerably less than the $50 million the Iowa company got for passing those rights on to Merck.

Exactly why Canada sold the commercial rights over this breakthrough Ebola vaccine to NewLink at bargain-basement prices remains a mystery on all counts.

Founded in 1999, NewLink is a small company of about 100 employees that focuses mainly on developing cancer therapies.

It has no manufacturing capacity and little experience with vaccines. While it has several products in the pipeline, none has yet reached the point of commercial production.

Since acquiring the rights to VSV-EBOV, it has moved at what some critics call an agonizingly slow pace. (NewLink says it is just being careful).

Amir Attaran, an Ottawa lawyer and immunology expert, points out that NewLink did not begin the most rudimentary clinical trials on the vaccine until last month.

And, as the company acknowledged to The Canadian Press, the vaccines for these clinical trials were paid for by Canada.

By 2013, the Public Health Agency, backed by the Department of National Defence, had spent $887,000 to have a German company, IDT Biologika, manufacture 1,500 vials of VSV-EBOV suitable for human trials.

It is this stockpile that is slated for use in trials planned for Europe, Africa, the U.S. and Canada.

In short, he Canadian government not only sold off commercial rights to its Ebola vaccine to a for-profit firm at sale-price rates. It also paid the lion’s share of costs required to test the vaccine for human use.

But then everything around this vaccine has been unusual.

It was developed not by some grand government design but because, as Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press has written, scientists attracted to the Winnipeg lab in the early years of the century happened to be interested in and knowledgeable about Ebola.

The vaccine was patented in 2003 and then, according to Attaran, more or less forgotten. Until the Defence Department came though with money a few years later, there was no attempt made to manufacture samples fit for human trials.

And when those 1,500 vials of vaccine were finally manufactured, the government kept the news to itself.

Even when the latest epidemic began to ravage Africa this spring, Ottawa was mum.

Not until August did the federal government publicly reveal that it had, in storage, an experimental vaccine that might be of use in combating Africa’s Ebola epidemic.

The government boldly announced it would donate 800 of these vials to the World Health Organization.

Yet in the end, it took more than two months for the vials to arrive at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

Canadian government officials said the logistics were tricky.

That explanation, like most of the tale around the handling of this breakthrough vaccine, was oddly unsatisfying.