LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organisation (WHO) says millions of doses of two experimental Ebola vaccines could be ready for use in 2015 and five more experimental vaccines will start being tested in March.

Still, the agency warned it’s not clear whether any of these will work against the deadly virus that has already killed at least 4,877 people this year in West Africa.

Dr Marie-Paule Kieny from the UN health agency told reporters that those doses could be available in 2015 if early tests proved that the two leading experimental vaccines are safe and provoke enough of an immune response to protect people from being infected with Ebola.

Trials of those two most advanced vaccines — one developed by GlaxoSmithKline in cooperation with the US National Institutes of Health, the other developed by the Canadian Public Health Agency and licensed to the US company NewLink Genetics — have already begun in the US, UK and Mali.

“The vaccine is not the magic bullet. But when ready, they may be a good part of the effort to turn the tide of this epidemic,” Kieny said.

If early data from the ongoing tests are promising, larger trials in West Africa would offer the shot to health workers and others at high risk of catching Ebola as soon as December, Kieny said. Previously those trials weren’t starting until January.

GSK said it might be able to make about one million doses of their vaccine per month by the end of 2015, assuming that some logistical and regulatory hurdles can be overcome.

Kieny also said five other possible Ebola vaccines should start being tested in March but did not specifically name them. She said Russian scientists are working on a number of vaccines including one that may be ready to go into clinical trials soon.

Johnson & Johnson said this week it would start preliminary testing of its experimental Ebola vaccine in January against a strain of Ebola that is very similar to the one causing the current outbreak in West Africa. It was not clear if that was one of the five mentioned by Kieny.

Kieny said plans to get the vaccines to West Africa had yet to be worked out, including who would pay for immunisation campaigns — which weren’t planned to start before June at the earliest. Kieny said the charity Doctors Without Borders pledged to create a vaccine fund and other organisations, including the World Bank, might help buy the vaccines.