In race for monkeypox vaccines, experts see repeat of COVID
Currently, more than 70% of the world’s monkeypox
cases are in Europe, and 98% are in men who have sex with men.
Associated Press
July 30, 2022
LONDON — Moves by rich countries to buy large quantities of monkeypox vaccine, while declining to share doses with Africa, could leave millions of people unprotected against a more dangerous version of the disease and risk continued spillovers of the virus into humans, public health officials are warning.
Critics fear a repeat of the catastrophic inequity problems seen during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The mistakes we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic are already being repeated,” said Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an assistant professor of medicine at Emory University.
While rich countries have ordered millions of vaccines to stop monkeypox within their borders, none have announced plans to share doses with Africa, where a more lethal form of monkeypox is spreading than in the West.
To date, there have been more than 22,000 monkeypox cases reported in nearly 80 countries since May, with about 75 suspected deaths in Africa, mostly in Nigeria and Congo. On Friday, Brazil and Spain reported deaths linked to monkeypox, the first reported outside Africa. Spain reported a second monkeypox death Saturday.
“The African countries dealing with monkeypox outbreaks for decades have been relegated to a footnote in conversations about the global response,” Titanji said.
Scientists say that, unlike campaigns to stop COVID-19, mass vaccinations against monkeypox won’t be necessary. They think targeted use of the available doses, along with other measures, could shut down the expanding epidemics that were recently designated by the World Health Organization as a global health emergency.
Yet while monkeypox is much harder to spread than COVID-19, experts warn if the disease spills over into general populations — currently in Europe and North America it is circulating almost exclusively among gay and bisexual men — the need for vaccines could intensify, especially if the virus becomes entrenched in new regions.
On Thursday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for the continent to be prioritized for vaccines, saying it was again being left behind.
“If we’re not safe, the rest of the world is not safe,” said Africa CDC’s acting director, Ahmed Ogwell.
Although monkeypox has been endemic in parts of Africa for decades, it mostly jumps into people from infected wild animals and has not typically spread very far beyond the continent.
Experts suspect the monkeypox outbreaks in North America and Europe may have originated in Africa long before the disease started spreading via sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium. Currently, more than 70% of the world’s monkeypox cases are in Europe, and 98% are in men who have sex with men.
Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergencies officer at WHO Europe, said the deaths in Spain did not change the agency’s assessment of the outbreak.
“Although the disease is self-limiting in most cases, monkeypox can cause severe complications,” she said in an email, adding that about 8% of infections reported had required hospitalization and that monkeypox could sometimes lead to life-threatening complications like encephalitis.
“With the continued spread of monkeypox in Europe, we will expect to see more deaths,” Smallwood said.
WHO is developing a vaccine-sharing mechanism for affected countries, but has released few details about how it might work. The U.N. health agency has made no guarantees about prioritizing poor countries in Africa, saying only that vaccines would be dispensed based on epidemiological need.
Some experts worry the mechanism could duplicate the problems seen with COVAX, created by WHO and partners in 2020 to try to ensure poorer countries would get COVID-19 shots. That missed repeated targets to share vaccines with poorer nations.
“Just asking countries to share is not going to be enough,” said Sharmila Shetty, a vaccines adviser for Medecins Sans Frontieres. “The longer monkeypox circulates, the greater chances it could get into new animal reservoirs or spread to” the human general population, she said.
At the moment, there’s only one producer of the most advanced monkeypox vaccine: the Danish company Bavarian Nordic. Its production capacity this year is about 30 million doses, with about 16 million vaccines available now.
In May, Bavarian Nordic asked the U.S. to release more than 215,000 doses it was due to receive “to assist with international requests the company was receiving,” and the U.S. complied, according to Bill Hall, a spokesman for the department of Health and Human Services. The U.S. will still receive the doses but at a later date.
The company declined to specify which countries it was allocating doses for.
Hall said the U.S. has not made any other promises to share vaccines. The U.S. has ordered by far the most number of doses, with 13 million reserved, although only about 1.4 million have been delivered.
Some African officials said it would be wise to stockpile some doses on the continent, especially given the difficulties Western countries were having stopping monkeypox.
“I really didn’t think this would spread very far, because monkeypox does not spread like COVID,” said Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. “Africa should procure some vaccines in case we need them, but we should prioritize diagnostics and surveillance so we know who to target.”
Dr. Ingrid Katz, a global health expert at Harvard University, said the monkeypox epidemics were “potentially manageable” if the limited vaccines were distributed appropriately. She believed it was still possible to prevent monkeypox from turning into a pandemic but “we need to be thoughtful in our prevention strategies and rapid in our response.”
In Spain, which has Europe’s biggest monkeypox outbreak, the demand for vaccines far exceeds supply.
“There is a real gap between the number of vaccines that we currently have available and the people who could benefit,” said Pep Coll, a medical director at a Barcelona health center that was dispensing shots this week.
Daniel Rofin, 41, was more than happy to be offered a dose. He said he decided to get vaccinated for the same reasons he was immunized against COVID-19.
“I feel reassured it is a way to stop the spread,” he said. “We (gay men) are a group at risk.”
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Alex Jones’ Unfounded Claims That Monkeypox Outbreak Due To Covid-19 Vaccines
Well, it was only a matter of time before someone started blaming the Covid-19 vaccines for the current ongoing monkeypox outbreak. After all, since early 2021, seemingly every time a new health problem has reached the news, some politicians, TV personalities, and anonymous social media accounts have tried to link the new problem back to the Covid-19 vaccines. For example, on May 1, I covered for Forbes how some folks were trying to connect the hepatitis outbreak among children to Covid-19 vaccination. They were doing this despite the minor detail that many of these children didn’t even receive Covid-19 vaccines.
So what Alex Jones tried to do on a recent episode of his InfoWars show shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Jones, who by the way is not medical doctor or other type of scientist yet has peddled supplements and other health products, tried to somehow connect the monkeypox outbreak with Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Covid-19 vaccines. If you’ve been Jonesing for a clip of this moment in Jones’s InfoWars show, Florida lawyer Ron Filipkowski provided one with the following tweet:
"Alex Jones insanely claims certain covid vaccines are causing monkeypox: “What is AstraZeneca and J+J. They’re virus vectors that inject the genome of a chimpanzee into your cells.” Maybe Marge Greene can discuss this with him on her next appearance on the show."
As you can see, Jones’s primary argument was that the monkeypox outbreak has been affecting the same countries where people have been receiving the Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines. Of course, that ain’t too compelling an argument. A lot has been going on in the 12 countries that have had monkeypox cases so far, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). For example, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, U.K., and the U.S. all have places that serve hot dogs as well. Yet, frankly, you don’t seem to hear anyone wondering whether hot dogs may be the source of the monkeypox outbreak.
Jones went on to claim that these two Covid-19 vaccines are “virus vectors that inject the genome of a chimpanzee in to your cells and then orders your cells to replicate under those orders.“ Umm, that would be correct except for the fact that it is completely wrong. As Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, pointed out in the following tweets, Jones seemed to be injecting quite a lot of what-the-bleep into his InfoWars segment.
3 comments:
Monkey Pox is spread almost exclusively through male homosexual encounters. You don't need another vaccine. Refrain from male-to-male sex and you'll be fine.
Why would anyone listen to Alex Jones? What gets me is that somebody must be listening to him and products must be advertising on his program. That my friends, is scary.
Just because two things occur at more or less the same time one should not necessarily be convinced that one causes the other.
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