Congolese authorities said that 50,000 doses of smallpox vaccine from the United States arrived on Tuesday, a week after the first batch arrived from the European Union.
Adults in Equateur, South Kivu and Sankuru, the three provinces most affected, will be vaccinated first, starting on October 2, Cris Kacita Osako, coordinator of the Congolese Committee for the Fight against Monkeypox, told the Associated Press.
Last week, the first batch of smallpox vaccine arrived in the capital of Congo, the center of the epidemic. The 100,000 doses of JYNNEOS vaccine, manufactured by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, were donated by the European Union through HERA, the Union’s agency for health emergencies. A further 100,000 doses were delivered over the weekend.
The 50,000 doses from the USA will be of the same JYNNEOS vaccine.
These 250,000 doses represent only a fraction of the three million doses which, according to the authorities, are needed to put an end to the smallpox epidemics in Congo, the epicenter of the global health emergency. EU countries have pledged to donate a further 500,000 doses, but the timetable for their delivery is unclear.
Since the start of 2024, 5,549 cases of smallpox have been confirmed on the continent, with 643 associated deaths, representing a sharp increase in the number of infections and deaths compared with previous years.Cases in Congo accounted for 91% of the total. Most smallpox cases in Congo and Burundi, the second most affected country, involve children under the age of 15.
Last week, the African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization launched a continent-wide response plan to the smallpox epidemic, three weeks after the WHO declared epidemics in 12 African countries a global emergency.
Congo has granted emergency authorization for the vaccine, which has already been used in Europe and the United States for adults. For the time being, deployment will be restricted to adults, with the priority target groups being those who have been in close contact with infected people and sex workers, CDC Africa Director General Dr Jean Kaseya told reporters last week.
The European Medicines Agency is examining additional data so that it can administer the vaccine to children aged 12 to 17, which could happen at the end of the month, said HERA Director General Laurent Muschel.The next batch of smallpox vaccine will come from Japan and could arrive as early as this weekend, Kacita Osako told the AP, without specifying the number of doses.
