Health officials have said vaccinations will play a critical role in combatting the outbreak.
The World Health Organization (WHO) authorised an mpox vaccine for the first time, calling it an important step toward fighting a rapidly growing outbreak in Africa.
The approval of Danish vaccine maker Bavarian Nordic’s jab means that donors, such as UNICEF and the vaccines alliance Gavi, can buy doses and send them to Africa, where an outbreak centred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has led to thousands of cases.
But supplies of the vaccine are limited because there’s only a single manufacturer.
“This first [authorisation] of a vaccine against mpox is an important step in our fight against the disease, both in the context of the current outbreaks in Africa, and in future,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
He called for “urgent” scale-up of procurement, donations, and rollout to get the vaccine where it is needed most, along with other response measures.
Wealthy countries in Europe and North America authorised Bavarian Nordic’s mpox vaccine during the global mpox outbreak in 2022.
Under the WHO authorisation, the vaccine can be administered to people aged 18 or above in a two-dose regimen.
There is limited evidence of how it works in children, but the approval says the vaccine may be used in infants, children, and adolescents “in outbreak settings where the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks”.
Officials at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said last month that nearly 70 per cent of cases in Congo – the country hardest hit by mpox – are in children younger than 15, who also accounted for 85 per cent of deaths.
Overall, WHO said over 120 countries have confirmed more than 103,000 cases of mpox since the outbreak began two years ago. Its latest tally, as of Sunday, showed that 723 people in more than a dozen countries in Africa have died of the disease.
African experts have estimated they might need about 10 million vaccines to stop the ongoing outbreaks on the continent.
The European Union and several member countries, along with the United States and Bavarian Nordic, plan to donate 620,000 doses of the Bavarian Nordic vaccine, according to the WHO. Meanwhile, Japan plans to send 3 million doses of the LC16 vaccine.
But as of last week, Congo, the most affected country, had received only about 250,000 shots.
On Thursday, the Africa CDC said 107 new deaths and 3,160 new cases had been recorded in the past week, a level that agency chief Dr Jean Kaseya described as “not acceptable”.
Mpox belongs to the same family of viruses as smallpox but causes milder symptoms like fever, chills, and body aches.
People with more serious cases can develop lesions on the face, hands, chest, and genitals.
