When will the DRC get more vaccines?
Health authorities in the DRC have said they will need around 3.5 million doses to protect its population, though supplies in the vast country remain extremely limited.
Several countries, including the US, Japan, and France, have said they will donate doses from their own stockpiles, and it is expected the jabs will reach the DRC as soon as next week.
The global vaccine group Gavi has also said it had up to $500 million to spend on getting shots to countries affected by the escalating outbreak.
The African Union has approved $10.4 million of emergency funding for the African Centre for Disease Control’s efforts to curb mpox, which said it aimed to secure three million doses of vaccine this year.
Yet sources involved in planning the country’s rollout told Reuters that just 65,000 doses were likely to be available in the short term, with vaccination campaigns unlikely to begin until at least October.
Other elements need to be hashed out too: who will get the vaccine? How will it be distributed? Can it be used as a prophylaxis – meaning it could be given in a targeted way to the contacts of mpox patients.
Do the vaccines work against all clades?
Yes – tentatively. According to the European Centre for Disease Control, data on clade-specific vaccine effectiveness is currently limited – much of the evidence links to clade two after it lapped the globe.
But public health experts say that, because the two strains are 90 per cent similar, they expect the vaccine to work against clade one.
And in a recent podcast for the Infectious Disease Society of America Dr Agam Rao, an mpox expert at the CDC said one small study from the agency suggested that the shots do produce a good immune response and appeared to protect health care workers in an area highly endemic for clade one.
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