COPENHAGEN: Danish drugmaker Bavarian Nordic announced on Wednesday that it had signed a contract to supply 440,000 doses of its Mpox vaccine to an “unnamed European country.”
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapid spread of the new, more dangerous Mpox strain, called Clade 1b, an international health emergency – the highest level of alert that the UN agency can issue.
Bavarian Nordic said the order was expected and included in the company’s annual forecasts.
“The latest order was planned as part of our original targets for this year and will therefore not impact the remaining capacity available to support governments and organizations in responding to the current WHO-declared international health emergency regarding Mpox,” Paul Chaplin, CEO of Bavarian Nordic, said in a statement.
The vaccine maker said last week that it was ready to deliver up to 10 million doses of its Mpox vaccine by the end of 2025.
The UN Health Ministry called for a significant increase in vaccine production and said that a vaccination campaign for the affected countries must be a top priority.
Last week, the African Union health agency said around 200,000 vaccines would be deployed across Africa thanks to agreements with the EU and the Danish drugmaker whose vaccine was approved in 2019.
France announced this week that it would donate 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine to countries suffering under a state of emergency, and the United States said it would donate 50,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 16,000 cases and 500 deaths have been reported this year.
On August 15, Sweden reported the first confirmed Clade 1b case outside Africa.
