After two years of waiting and an outbreak of the disease.. Monkeypox vaccines are on their way to Africa

The delay in vaccines already being made available in more than 70 countries outside Africa showed that lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic about global health inequality were slow to change, six public health officials and scientists said.

Among the hurdles is that the World Health Organization only formally began this month the process needed to give poor countries easy access to large quantities of vaccines through international agencies, something that several officials and scientists told Reuters could have been years away.

Monkeypox is a potentially fatal infection that causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and is spread through physical contact.

The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on August 14 after the new strain, known as clade Ib, began spreading from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to neighboring African countries.

In response to media questions about the delay in the vaccine rollout, the UN health agency said on Friday that it would ease some of its procedures in an attempt to speed up the delivery of monkeypox vaccines to poor countries.

Buying expensive vaccines outright is out of reach for many poor countries. There are two main types of monkeypox vaccine, made by Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic and Japan’s KM Biologics. The Bavarian Nordic vaccine costs $100 per dose, and the price of the KM Biologics vaccine is not yet known.

The long wait for WHO approval for international agencies to purchase and distribute the vaccine has forced individual African governments and the continent’s public health agency (the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to seek vaccine donations from wealthy countries instead.

This cumbersome process risks collapsing, as it has before, if donors feel they must hold on to the vaccine to protect their own people.

The first 10,000 vaccines on their way to Africa were donated by the United States, and were not provided by the UN system.

“It’s really scandalous that after Africa struggled to access vaccines during the Covid pandemic, the region is once again falling behind,” said Helen Rees, a member of the Africa CDC emergency committee and executive director of the RHI Research Institute at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In 2022, after a variant of smallpox spread outside Africa, governments reintroduced the vaccines within weeks, received regulatory approval, and were used in about 70 high- and middle-income countries to protect people most at risk.

These vaccines have now reached 1.2 million people in the United States alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But no vaccines have been available in Africa outside of clinical trials, largely because the vaccines needed World Health Organization approval before public health groups could buy them.

Source: Agencies