At the end of last week and after several delays, a first shipment of monkeypox, or mpox, vaccine donations finally arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). While the Big Pharma corporations and the Western governments who’ve been sitting on stockpiles of these vaccines for two years might try to claim a PR success, the truth is that the whole crisis exposes the deeply neocolonial nature of the global health system.
Despite the lessons that we should have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about the lethal inequities that shape the production and supply of medical treatments, those who benefit from the status quo are still resisting the necessary transformation. As long as the current system remains in place, it will pose a serious danger to public health throughout the world.
Paul Chaplin is the CEO of Bavarian Nordic, the company that owns the Jynneos vaccine shown to be most effective against mpox. He declared that he was proud to meet urgent health needs in the DRC. Stella Kyriakides, the European commissioner for health and food safety, stated that the EU was pleased to be acting “in partnership and global solidarity” with Africa.
However, at around one hundred thousand doses, this first donation of mpox vaccines to arrive in the DRC was a small fraction of the three million doses that the country says it needs. It also came after several planned deliveries from the United States were delayed, and a full eighteen months after the central African country declared the outbreak to be an epidemic. In that period of time, the United…
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Auteur: Tim Bierley
