Africa’s first batch of mpox vaccines will this week finally reaching the mainlandweeks after they were made available in other parts of the world.
The 10,000 shots, donated by the US, will be used to pack a dangerous new variant of the virus, formerly known as monkeypox, to a 2022 outbreak caused global alarm.
Vaccines have already been made available abroad in more than 70 countries Africaand the failure to provide the continent with anti-mpox shots until now shows troubling problems in the way international agencies deal with global health emergencies, medical officials and scientists warned last week.
They say that it is the World Health Organization (WHO) until this month to officially begin the process needed to give African countries easy access to large quantities of vaccines via international agencies – despite the fact that the disease has plagued people there for decades. That process could have started years ago, they told Reuters.
Mpox is a potentially fatal infection that causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions, and spreads through close physical contact. It was declared a global health emergency by the WHO on August 14 after the new variant, known as clade Ib, began to spread from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to neighboring countries in Africa.
The long wait for WHO approval for international agencies to buy and distribute the vaccines has forced individual African governments and the continent’s public health agency – the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) – to instead donate shots to request from rich countries.
That cumbersome process could collapse – as it has in the past – if donor countries feel they must keep the vaccines to protect their own populations.
Helen Rees, a member of the Africa CDC’s mpox emergency committee and executive director of the Wits RHI Research Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Reuters it was “truly outrageous” that after Africa struggled to access vaccines in the Covid pandemic, the continent was once again left behind.
to newsletter promotion
The Africa CDC said that 10 million doses may be needed across the continent to deal with the outbreak.
But the WHO only this month asked vaccine manufacturers to submit the information needed for the mpox shots to receive an emergency license – the WHO’s accelerated approval for medical products. It asked countries to donate shots until the process was completed in September.
In turn, according to the New York Timesthe WHO has said it does not have the data needed to conduct a full review for approval of the vaccine, and an emergency licensing process can only be carried out after a public health emergency of international concern has been declared.
