Why mpox vaccines are only just arriving in Africa after two years

Lessons from COVID-19 inequities delay mpox vaccine access in Africa, with first 10,000 doses going to Nigeria.

The first 10,000 mpox vaccines are finally due to arrive next week in Africa, where a dangerous new strain of the virus - which has afflicted people there for decades - has caused global alarm.

The slow arrival of the shots – which have already been made available in more than 70 countries outside Africa - showed that lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about global healthcare inequities have been slow to bring change, half a dozen public health officials and scientists said.

Among the hurdles: It took the World Health Organization (WHO) until this month to start, officially, the process needed to give poor countries easy access to large quantities of vaccine via international agencies. That could have begun years ago, several of the officials and scientists told Reuters.

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 August 14 after the new strain, known as Clade Ib, began to proliferate from the Democratic Republic of Congo to neighbouring African countries.

In response to Reuters questions about the delays in vaccine deployment, the U.N. health agency said on Friday, August 23, that it would relax some of its procedures on this occasion in an effort to now accelerate poor countries' access to the mpox shots.

Buying the expensive vaccines directly is out of reach for many low-income countries. There are two key mpox shots, made by Denmark's Bavarian Nordic and Japan's KM Biologics. Bavarian Nordic's costs USD 100 a dose; the price of KM Biologics' is unknown.

The long wait for WHO approval for international agencies to buy and distribute the vaccine has forced individual African governments and the continent's public health agency - the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – to instead request donations of shots from rich countries. That cumbersome process can collapse, as it has before, if donors feel they should keep the vaccine to protect their own people.