Highlight
- WHO says it is building new vaccine-sharing mechanism to prevent monkeypox outbreak
- WHO Director-General Tedros said the agency is developing an initiative for fair access to vaccines
- The WHO has described the outbreak as “unusual” and said the continued spread of the virus was worrying
The World Health Organization said it is building a new vaccine-sharing mechanism to prevent monkeypox outbreaks in more than 30 countries beyond Africa. The move could result in the UN health agency distributing rare vaccine doses to wealthy countries that could otherwise afford them.
For some health experts, the initiative misses an opportunity to potentially control the monkeypox virus in African countries where it has infected people for decades, another example of the disparity in vaccine distribution seen during the coronavirus pandemic.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency is developing an initiative for “fair access” to vaccines and treatments, which it hopes will be ready within weeks. The mechanism was proposed soon after hundreds of monkeypox cases were reported last month by Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the US and other countries.
The WHO has described the outbreak as “unusual” and said the continued spread of the virus is of concern that its expert committee should be called next week to decide whether monkeypox should be declared a global emergency.
The smallpox vaccine, a related disease, is thought to be about 85% effective against monkeypox. The WHO’s Europe director, Dr. Hans Kluge, said on Wednesday he was concerned by the scramble by some wealthy countries to buy more vaccines without talking about buying supplies for Africa.
Kluge urged governments to “approach monkeypox without repeating the mistakes of the pandemic.” Still, he didn’t downplay the possibility that countries like Britain, which currently has the largest outbreak beyond Africa, could get vaccines through the WHO.
He said the program is being built for all countries and vaccines will be distributed largely based on their epidemiological needs.
“Europe remains the epicenter of this growing outbreak, with 25 countries reporting more than 1,500 cases, or 85% of the global total,” Kluge said.
Some African experts questioned why the UN health agency has not proposed using vaccines in Central and West Africa, where the disease is endemic.
“The place to start any vaccination should be Africa and not elsewhere,” said Dr. Ahmed Ogwell, acting director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He said the lack of any vaccine to combat monkeypox on the continent, where there have been more than 1,500 suspected cases and 72 deaths this year, is of more serious concern than the mostly mild disease clusters being reported in wealthy countries. was the subject.
“This is an extension of the disparity we saw during COVID,” said Ifeni Nasofor, a Nigerian infectious disease physician and advisor to Upswell, a communications agency. “We have had hundreds of monkeypox cases in Nigeria since 2017 and we are dealing with it on our own,” he said. “Nobody discussed when vaccines might be available for Africa.”
Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, global health agencies established COVAX, a United Nations-backed effort to distribute COVID-19 vaccines. But rich countries bought up most of the world’s supplies, and the COVAX program missed many of the goals of sharing supplements with the world’s poor.
To date, only about 17% of people in poor countries have received a single dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Some experts fear the same could happen with monkeypox.
“Like Covid, there is no clear path for how poor countries will be able to get vaccines,” said Brooke Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University.
He warned that as the WHO tries to determine how many vaccines are available, wealthy countries that previously promised doses may not cooperate.
Baker predicted, “The rich countries will defend themselves while people in the global south die.”
On Monday, the advocacy group Public Citizen sent a letter to the White House, asking whether the Biden administration would release the 20 million smallpox vaccines the US used in 2004 for the WHO to use in an emergency, like a biological attack. was given to.
Asked about the commitment, a senior US official said the government was “exploring all options” to advance its efforts to stop monkeypox within the US and globally.
The official said the US has returned more than 200,000 doses of the smallpox vaccine to the manufacturer so that they can be available to others. The official declined to say whether the US considers the current monkeypox outbreak an emergency that warrants the release of 20 million pledged vaccines.
The US has at least 1.4 million doses of the vaccine and has ordered another 13 million, according to health data and analytics firm Airfinity. So far, 72 cases of monkeypox have been reported in the US.
Francois Balloux, an infectious disease specialist at University College London, said vaccination efforts in wealthy countries should change future monkeypox response strategies in Africa.
“Vaccinating people should really be a priority in Africa, where there is a terrible strain that has actually killed people,” he said, adding that there was a potential for more monkeypox outbreaks in the future.
“Any vaccination that happens in Europe is not going to solve the problem,” Balloux said.
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