Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Some countries have pledged to donate doses of mpox vaccines to combat an outbreak of the disease in Africa after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it a global public health emergency in August, according to a DD News report.
Such donations are meant to address the huge inequity that left African nations with no access to the shots used during the global outbreak in 2022.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicentre of the current outbreak, launched its first mpox vaccination campaign on October 5.
According to the DD report, Canada will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses, a Government spokesperson said. The number of doses to be donated depends on the receiving countries’ capacity for storage and administration.France will donate 100,000 doses based on “locally identified needs”, its Health Ministry said on the Q&A section of its website.
Germany will donate 100,000 doses from its military stocks to help contain the outbreak in the short term, a Government spokesperson said. Japan has pledged to donate 3 million doses of KM Biologics’ LC16 vaccine, the largest number of doses pledged to date, the WHO said.
Spain will donate 500,000 doses, or 20 per cent of its stockpile, its Health Ministry said. It has also urged the European Commission to propose that all EU countries donate 20 pc of their respective stock of the vaccine.
US President Joe Biden pledged in September that the US would donate 1 million doses of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine and at least $500 million to African countries to support their response to the outbreak.
The EU and its member states are donating at least 566,500 doses of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine to African countries, including more than 215,000 doses donated by the bloc’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) in cooperation with the Danish vaccine maker.
Additional 351,500 doses will be sent via the Team Europe initiative, comprising EU and its members. Those will mainly come from France, Germany, Spain, Malta, Portugal, Luxembourg, Croatia, Austria, Poland, and potentially some other member states.
