“I have decided to declare a public health emergency of international concern.” Faced with the increase in cases of monkeypox, the World Health Organization (WHO) triggered its highest level of alert on Saturday, announced Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The day before, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced that it had approved the use of the Imvanex vaccine to combat the spread of monkeypox which has so far affected more than 16,000 people in 74 countries, including 1,700 in France.
Only one licensed vaccine
This vaccine, also known as Jynneos in the United States and Imvamune in Canada, has been authorized in the European Union since 2013, but only against smallpox. Its manufacturer, the Bavarian Nordic laboratory, welcomed this “employment extension that usually lasts between six and nine months.”
For weeks now, the Danish biotech company has seen its orders multiply around the world. In fact, it is currently the only one that markets a smallpox vaccine. The United States, which authorized the use of its monkeypox vaccine in 2019, has already ordered 7 million doses. An order for 1.5 million doses from an unnamed European country was also announced last week. At the end of June, the European health authority Hera (created in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic) also bought nearly 100,000 vaccines made available from the 27, as well as from Norway and Iceland.
“Operating our production plant overnight”
At this stage, the company says it can cope with the increase in orders: “Any additional demand we face, we hope to meet with our own resources,” said Rolf Sass Sørensen.
However, Bavarian indicated that it was in talks with a subcontractor in the United States and other producers to further expand its production capacity if necessary. But “we are trying to avoid that”, said Rolf Sass Sørensen, believing that calling other vaccine manufacturers “would be time consuming and expensive”. “We will only press this button” if demand increases considerably, Paul Chaplin, managing director of the Danish group, also told Reuters.
Forecasts revised upwards
Governments are unlikely to issue ex officio licenses to allow other laboratories to manufacture the vaccine with their own resources, he said.
The amounts of the contracts signed with Bavarian Nordic for the purchase of vaccine have not been disclosed. The Danish group, however, acknowledged at the end of June that these orders had allowed it to raise its forecasts for this year four times in three weeks.
For fiscal 2022, the company now expects a turnover of between 2.3 billion and 2.5 billion Danish kroner (340 million euros), up from 1.9 billion and 2.1 billion previously. The group’s title is also up more than 150% since the start of the monkeypox epidemic.
Source: BFM TV
