Danish Drugmaker Ready to Cash In with 10 Million Monkeypox Vaccine Doses Set for Production Following WHO’s Global Health Emergency Declaration
Danish drugmaker Bavarian Nordic is poised to begin large-scale production of its monkeypox vaccine.
The company’s rapid response comes in the wake of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent declaration of a global health emergency concerning the monkeypox outbreak.
The WHO’s emergency committee convened amid alarming reports of a more virulent strain of monkeypox spreading across four additional regions in Africa.
As of mid-August 2024, over 17,000 cases and more than 500 deaths have been reported across 13 African nations, with the outbreak initially contained to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasized the “severity” of the situation during a virtual meeting with independent experts.
Following their recommendations, he declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), signaling the highest level of health alert under international law, less than three months before Americans are scheduled to vote for president.
Danish pharmaceutical giant Bavarian Nordic announced on Thursday that it was prepared to produce up to 10 million doses of its mpox vaccine by 2025, Barrons reported.
The news outlet added that Bavarian Nordic had the infrastructure to manufacture an additional two million doses in 2024 and a total of 10 million doses by 2025. The company, however, is awaiting orders from concerned countries before ramping up production.
“We need to see the contracts,” Rolf Sass Sorensen, the vice-president of Bavarian Nordic, stated. Meanwhile, the company boasts a stockpile of 500,000 doses ready for deployment.
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Shares in Bavarian Nordic, whose vaccine against mpox has been licensed since 2019, rose nearly eight percent on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange on Thursday, following the WHO announcement. This followed a 12 percent climb on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union’s health agency, announced that over 200,000 doses of the vaccine were to be deployed in Africa, following an agreement with the European Union (EU) and Bavarian Nordic.
A total of 38,465 cases of the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, have been reported in 16 African countries since January 2022, with 1,456 deaths.
There has been a 160 percent increase in cases this year compared to the previous year, according to data published last week by the health agency
“I would like to underline one thing that is very important to WHO. We do have uncertainty around the effectiveness of these vaccines because they haven’t been used in this context and in this scale before,” Tim Nguyen stressed.
“And therefore, when these vaccines are being developed, that they are delivered in the context of clinical trial studies and prospectively collecting this data to increase our understanding of the effectiveness of these vaccines,” he said.
After the Biden administration ordered 13 million monkeypox vaccines from the European biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic, spending a total of $119 million on the ‘Jynneos’ vaccines, recipients reported some troubling side effects.
