Health
Mpox Vaccine slow to reach Africa; U.S. and UAE donate
Garfield Ekon
Staff Writer
Africa, September 4, 2024 – The first batch of Mpox vaccines have finally arrived on the African continent this week; weeks after they had been made available in other parts of the world and in quantities far below what is needed in order to tackle the dangerous new variant of the virus.
Vaccines have already been made available in more than 70 countries outside Africa and the failure to provide the continent with anti-Mpox shots until now displays worrying problems in the way international agencies deal with global health emergencies, medical officials and scientists warned last week.
The 10,000 shots are donated by the United States (US), and follows the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring, earlier this month, urging that the process needed to give African countries easy access to large quantities of vaccines via international agencies – despite the fact that the disease has afflicted people there for decades.
On Tuesday September 3, the UN confirmed that the UAE had dispatched several aircraft carrying Mpox vaccines to the
Mpox is a potentially deadly 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 14 August after the new variant, known as clade Ib, began to spread from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into neighbouring African countries.
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 Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) – to instead request donations of shots from rich countries.
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, said it was “really outrageous” that, after Africa struggled to access vaccines in the Covid pandemic, the continent had once again been left behind.
The Africa CDC has said that 10 million doses may be needed across the continent to cope with the outbreak. The WHO asked vaccine manufacturers only this month to submit the information needed for the Mpox shots to receive an emergency licence – the WHO’s accelerated approval for medical products. It urged countries to donate shots until the process was completed in September.
Also, the WHO said it did not have the data it required to do a full review for approval of the vaccine, and an emergency licence process can be carried out only after a public health emergency of international concern has been declared.