NONE of the African countries affected by the outbreak of a new variant of mpox have received any of the promised vaccine, pushing back a rollout that had been planned for last week.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been at the centre of an outbreak of the new clade 1b variant, with 18,000 suspected cases and 629 deaths this year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The variant has also been found in Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Sweden and Thailand.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that the first doses should arrive in the DRC “within days” but similar statements were recently made regarding donated shots from the US, which did not materialise on time.
There has been no coordinated response, with Spain pledging as many as 500,000 doses while France and Germany have promised 100,000 each and the US said it will donate 50,000. None of the pledges have so far been delivered.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said on Wednesday that the $245m (£187m) it had requested to tackle the outbreak was only 10% funded.
Despite mpox being first identified in humans in the DRC in 1970, African nations vulnerable to its spread are reliant on donations of vaccines from the stockpiles of richer nations.
Dr Dimie Ogoina, an infectious disease physician at the Niger Delta University teaching hospital, said neglect both internationally and by African governments meant that, decades after mpox was first identified, there were still not enough vaccines or even treatments available to the affected countries.
He said it was only during the global outbreak in 2022, which saw the virus spread to Europe and North America, that there was a wider international reaction to the disease.
Ogoina said it was important for African countries themselves to invest in protecting against diseases such as mpox to ensure they are not reliant on donors.
“The manufacturers are not based in Africa,” he said. “They tend to favour, knowingly or unknowingly, the global north. So if there’s a list of people to procure, Africa is always last in the list, and we are always the last to get supplies.”
