Health announces the purchase of thousands of vaccines to deal with the monkeypox outbreak | Society

After almost a week of preparations, the Ministry of Health has informed the communities today at the meeting of the Interterritorial Council of Health the decision to buy thousands of vaccines to deal with the current outbreak of monkeypox suffered by twenty countries in the world, have confirmed health sources. Spain, which is the second most affected country after the United Kingdom, today has added eight new positive cases to reach 59, according to the PCR tests carried out by the National Center for Microbiology.

The decision to buy, advanced last week EL PAÍS, It comes after other countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany, which announced on Tuesday the acquisition of 40,000 doses, have taken the same step in recent days and that communities such as Madrid have urged the Ministry to take the step. In addition to vaccines, Health is also preparing to purchase antiviral treatments to treat patients at higher risk. All cases diagnosed in Spain so far have had a mild evolution.

The vaccine to be purchased is Imvanex, manufactured by the Danish laboratory Bavarian Nordic (the only manufacturer). Actually, the vaccine is not authorized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) against monkeypox, but against traditional smallpox. Both viruses, however, are similar and the immune response developed against one also confers protection against the other in more than 85% of cases. In the United States, where this drug is marketed under the brand name Jynneos, the authorization is for both types of smallpox.

The fact that Spain acquires the vaccines does not necessarily mean that it will use them, but rather it is a step to be prepared for a possible increase in cases or future outbreaks. The decision to start using it must be made by the Public Health Commission in accordance with the recommendations of the experts from the Vaccine Conference, which plans to discuss it at a meeting scheduled for the next few days. In separate meetings held this week, the two bodies have already discussed it, although they have not yet made a decision.

“The vaccine can be a useful tool. Its use will not be generalized in any case, but to avoid infection in close contacts of those infected whose health may be at risk. Perhaps also for health personnel with a higher risk of exposure. In any case, the current measures to control the outbreak, such as early identification of cases, isolation of patients, and contact tracing and surveillance, are having an effect in controlling the outbreak. But the vaccine will be one more asset that we will have if necessary, ”explain health sources.

The use of the smallpox vaccine in an outbreak is carried out following a so-called “ring” strategy, in which the risk contacts of the people who test positive are successively vaccinated until the chains of contagion are stopped. The administration should preferably be done in the first four days after exposure to the virus, since if it is done later it is not possible to avoid contagion, although the symptoms are milder.

The reason why the immune response achieved against the vaccine is faster than the natural one against the virus itself, and therefore allows adelentarse for the purposes of infection and prevention, it is because the injection skips one of the phases that the virus follows in the body. After being contagious between two people, the pathogen first reaches the respiratory tract, where it replicates during the first days (normally three to five). Subsequently, the virus passes to the lymph nodes and three or four days later it passes to the blood. With the vaccine, the process starts directly in the lymph nodes, so when the virus reaches the blood after natural infection, it finds an immune system already prepared to deal with it.

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