2024-08-21 12:00:08
An employee of the Bavarian Nordic Vaccine Company in a laboratory in Martinsried, Germany, in May 2022.
In Kvestegaard, north of Copenhagen, it feels like déjà vu. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the African pox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Wednesday, August 14, attention has been focused on the vaccine production plant that Bavarian Nordic AG has built in the town for decades.
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The global coronavirus outbreak thrust the Danish industrialist into the spotlight two years ago. Bavarian Nordic was one of the rare pharmaceutical laboratories with a vaccine, MVA-BN, that could offer protection against the disease, when it was inundated with orders and struggled to even cope with the sudden demand. Because if there are other vaccines, notably LC16 from Japan’s KM Biologics or more recently OrthopoxVac from Russian state laboratory Vector, they are still used today almost exclusively for their respective national markets, unlike the Danish products approved by most health authorities around the world.
“However, it is reported that measles will make a comeback. The behavioral changes of the virus, which initially spread from animals to humans, then became human-to-human.commented Jean-Daniel Lelièvre, Head of the Department of Clinical Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Henri-Mondor Hospital in Créteil (AP-HP). Still, we haven’t given ourselves other means of mass-producing vaccines. »
Facing the current epidemic in Africa, Bavaria Nordic is working hard to increase production capacity. The laboratory said it is ready to increase supplies for MPOX by mobilizing production lines used to produce other vaccines to deliver up to 10 million doses to the continent by 2025, with 2 million doses available by the end of 2020. supply. Enough to organize a vaccine response by immunizing high-risk groups in the most affected countries.
Price, a recurring obstacle
The order still needs to be there. Discussions on the topic are ongoing among pharmaceutical groups, the World Health Organization, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the African Union public health agency (Africa CDC) and national governments. Undoubtedly, one of the challenges remains the cost of purchasing these products, which are beyond the reach of most African countries and act as a recurring barrier to access to vaccination. Faced with this difficulty, the Bavarian Nordic and African Center for Disease Prevention and Control has also launched negotiations aimed at transferring technology to produce pox vaccines on the continent, thereby lowering the price of future vaccine acquisition.
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