Nairobi, Jul 28 Africa has not yet received any doses of the vaccines used against monkeypox – declared an international health emergency last week by the World Health Organization (WHO) -, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today ( Africa CDC).
“We have not received any doses so far. We are still in talks with the relevant actors to find a way to bring vaccines to the continent,” Ahmed Ogwell, acting director of the Africa CDC, an agency dependent on Africa, said Thursday during a virtual press conference. the African Union (AU).
According to Ogwell, the reasons why these drugs have not yet reached Africa – the only continent that has registered deaths from this disease – “are the same that explain the delay in obtaining vaccines against covid-19 or treatment against HIV for about 20 years. behind”: the intellectual property of these products and the lack of the necessary (economic) resources to acquire them.
“(The vaccines) are in the hands of those who have more capacity or where those products are being manufactured,” added the interim director.
Rich countries such as the United States or the members of the European Union (EU) are acquiring the drugs recommended until now to immunize against monkeypox.
Among these drugs is the Imnavex vaccine, authorized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -where it is marketed under the name of Jynneos- against both smallpox and monkeypox.
There is also the ACAM2000 vaccine, approved by the FDA to prevent smallpox.
“We are talking to the (intellectual) owners of the products so that they appreciate the need to have a public health perspective and not a pure business one,” Ogwell stressed.
The acting director of the Africa CDC was referring to the early hoarding of covid-19 vaccines by rich countries during the first year of the pandemic, which meant that the African continent achieved access to the drugs long after the nations of the global north.
Many poor countries on the continent depend almost entirely on the COVAX equitable access program (promoted by the WHO and other organizations) and on the collective procurement mechanism established by the AU to be able to purchase vaccines.
Another major obstacle for African nations was patents, which pharmaceutical companies refused to release, as well as the low capacity of the continent’s vaccine production sector, which imports 99% of those it consumes.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), since the beginning of 2022 and to date, more than 18,000 cases of monkeypox have been detected in 78 countries, while the Africa CDC confirmed that more than 2,000 infections have been registered in eleven African nations (although the vast majority are suspected and not laboratory confirmed), in addition to 75 deaths.
In addition, the countries where the disease is endemic are African: Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Ghana ( where it has only been identified in animals). EFE
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