International efforts to provide monkeypox vaccines to address disease outbreak in Africa
Yesterday, Tuesday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a public health emergency over the spread of monkeypox, raising concern on the continent for the first time, and today, Wednesday, a committee led by the World Health Organization is meeting to determine whether the disease poses a global threat.
Stakeholders say vaccines needed to help limit the escalating outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries could be delayed by months, even as the World Health Organization considers declaring the disease a global outbreak, as Africa’s largest public health agency has done.
While experts had hoped the meetings would spur action worldwide, many obstacles remain, including limited vaccine supplies, funding, and outbreaks. “It is important to declare a state of emergency because the disease is spreading,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, director of Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research.
Tamfum expressed hope that any announcement would help provide more funding for surveillance, as well as support access to vaccines in Congo. But he acknowledged that the road has not been easy in a vast country where health facilities and humanitarian funding are already severely strained by conflict and outbreaks of diseases such as measles and cholera.
For his part, Emmanuel Nakoni, a smallpox expert at the Pasteur Institute in Bangui in the Central African Republic, said: “If grand declarations remain mere words, it will not make any difference on the ground.”
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that it had received $10.4 million in emergency funding from the African Union to fight monkeypox, and Director-General Jean Cassia said Tuesday that there was a clear plan to secure 3 million doses of the vaccine this year, without elaborating.
However, sources involved in planning the vaccination rollout in Congo said that only 65,000 doses were likely to be available in the short term and that campaigns were unlikely to begin before next October at the earliest.
Regarding the spread of the epidemic, more than 15,000 suspected cases of smallpox have been recorded in Africa this year and 461 deaths, most of them among children in Congo, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The viral infection is usually mild but can kill, causing flu-like symptoms. A new strain of the virus caused an outbreak in refugee camps in eastern Congo this year, spreading for the first time to Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and Kenya. Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa are also experiencing outbreaks linked to another strain of the virus which spread globally in 2022 largely due to same-sex sex.
That outbreak prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency that ended 10 months later. Two vaccines, Bavaria Nordic’s Genius and LC16, were then used by KM Biologicals.
Beyond clinical trials, no vaccine has ever been available in Congo or across Africa, where the disease has been endemic for decades. LC16 is only approved for use in children. Congolese regulators approved the vaccines for domestic use last June, but the government has not formally asked manufacturers or governments like the United States that are seeking donations through the global vaccine group Gavi.
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