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Vaccines to contain the escalating MPOX outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighbouring countries may not reach the Central African country for months, even as the World Health Organization (WHO) considers following the lead of Africa’s top public health agency, which has declared the outbreak an emergency.
On Tuesday, the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the first public health emergency of continental concern. A WHO-led panel will meet on Wednesday to determine whether the threat is global.
While experts hoped the meetings would spur global action, many hurdles remain, including limited vaccine supplies, limited funding and competing disease outbreaks.
“It is important to declare a state of emergency because the disease is spreading,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, head of Congo’s Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale (INRB). He said he hoped such a declaration would help provide more funding for surveillance and support access to vaccines in Congo.
But he acknowledged that the road ahead was not easy in a vast country where health care and humanitarian funds are already strained by conflict and outbreaks of diseases such as measles and cholera.
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“If the big statements remain just words, it will not make any material difference,” said Emmanuel Nakoune, an MPOX expert at the Institut Pasteur de Bangui in the Central African Republic.
Africa CDC reported last week that it had received $10.4 million in emergency funding from the African Union for the MPOX response, and Director-General Jean Kaseya said Tuesday there was a clear plan to secure 3 million doses of vaccine this year, without elaborating.
However, sources involved in planning the vaccination campaign in Congo indicated that only 65,000 doses would likely be available in the short term and that the campaigns would probably not start before October.
According to Africa CDC, there have been more than 15,000 suspected cases of mpox in Africa this year and 461 deaths, mostly among children in Congo. The viral infection is usually mild but can be fatal, causing flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions.
A new strain of the virus has caused outbreaks in refugee camps in eastern Congo this year and has spread for the first time to Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Kenya.
Ivory Coast and South Africa also suffered outbreaks linked to a different strain of the virus, which spread globally in 2022, mainly among men who have sex with men. The outbreak prompted the WHO to declare a global health emergency, which was lifted 10 months later.
Two vaccines were then used: Bavarian Nordic’s Jynneos and KM Biologics’ LC16. Outside of clinical trials, neither has ever been available in Congo or across Africa, where the disease has been endemic for decades. Only LC16 is approved for use in children.
Congolese regulators approved the vaccines for domestic use in June, but the government has not yet made official requests to manufacturers or to governments such as the United States, which are seeking donations through the global vaccine agency Gavi.
