The World Health Organization was to host an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss ways to ensure equitable global access to tests, treatments and vaccines for mpox, a top official said, as the viral infection spreads to parts of Africa and beyond.
The meeting will be attended by members of an alliance of health experts who have overseen the global response to COVID-19 and include international health organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
They will discuss how to ensure that failures during the COVID pandemic to ensure equal access to medical treatments, tests and vaccines are not repeated with the mpox outbreak, said Ayoade Alakija, meeting chair and WHO special envoy.
The UN health agency declared a global health emergency for mpox on Wednesday after a massive outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo spread to neighboring countries. On Thursday, Sweden reported the first case outside Africa linked to the outbreak.
“We failed in access to products last time, but we learned those lessons… and I will make sure that equity (equal access) is the first thing we think about (now),” Alakija said.
During COVID, many low-income countries were left behind as high-income countries grabbed medical tools to fight the virus, especially vaccines. The WHO-led alliance ultimately saw nearly two billion vaccines, hundreds of millions of tests and hundreds of thousands of treatments delivered worldwide.
Mpox was also declared a global health emergency in 2022 and access was again uneven. For example, vaccines were widely available in areas such as Europe and the United States, but are still not available in Africa two years later, despite the severity of ongoing outbreaks.
Alakija emphasized that fighting the disease is not just about vaccines, however, as public health measures such as awareness campaigns could also help communities protect themselves, in a similar vein to the HIV response.
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