Ansel, thank you for posting the narrative of what happened at the Reston monkey import facility.
A few salient points that need to be made clear:
1) There is no firm evidence that the Ebola Reston strain ever spread through aerosols. That particular facility was, by the accounts, very dirty (a “monkey hell” in one description), and the virus could easily have been carried between rooms, for instance, on someone’s sleeve.
2) Ebola Reston is not a mutation of Ebola Zaire; they both split from some ancestor filovirus, probably tens of thousands of years ago. I haven’t looked at the phylogenetic trees, so I am guessing; the point is, that these have both been circulating for a while in animal reservoirs.
3) There is no evidence that Ebola Reston causes symptomatic disease in humans. As far as I know, 15 people were documented to be seropositive for Ebola Reston (that is, they have antibody evidence of previous infection), but no one has ever become ill from it. The WHO still recommends handling Reston under BSL4 conditions, because there remains the possibility that some people would develop full-blown Ebola fever disease from exposure to Reston virus.
Which makes it an excellent candidate on which to base an Ebola vaccine. Much as cowpox provided immunity to smallpox, it may be that a vaccine derived from Ebola-Reston may provide immunity to other strains of Ebola.
There are just a few some practical difficulties with this line of research.
No doubt there are labs working this angle right now. Time is very short for a medical answer.