Health leaders have said the failure to show solidarity with African countries at the heart of the MPOX outbreak is putting the world at risk and harming preparedness for future pandemics.
The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency on Wednesday due to the increasing number of cases spreading outside the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the virus is endemic.
So far this year, more than 18,700 cases and more than 500 deaths have been reported in Africa, which is already higher than in all of 2023. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared a continental public health emergency.
Dr Ebere Okereke, an associate fellow in Chatham House’s global health programme, said: “The consequences of not responding robustly to these statements could be severe, potentially leading to greater spread of new and more dangerous variants. The risk of not acting now is not just a risk for Africa, but also for the rest of the world.”
Both statements, she said, “offer an opportunity to test the global response to health emergencies in the post-Covid-19 era, to show that lessons on equity have been learned.”
The response to the Covid pandemic has damaged relations between richer and poorer countries, with resources such as vaccines, tests and PPE taking much longer to reach developing countries than their wealthier counterparts.
Negotiations over a planned pandemic deal that would govern how the world responds to major disease outbreaks have failed to meet a deadline for an agreement at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this year. The issue of equity has emerged as a major sticking point, including how developing countries would get access to medicines and treatment in exchange for their efforts to gather information about pathogens circulating in their territories.
Okereke said the way the global community responds to the statements “will be a litmus test for the potential effectiveness of a future pandemic treaty”.
And a disappointing response would raise questions about the effectiveness of current systems for declaring emergencies, she said.
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “Mpox has been endemic in a handful of African countries for years. But despite the availability of drugs to treat it, no serious action was taken until the outbreak posed a threat to the West.
“We saw the same inequality play out during the Covid pandemic, when lives lost in the Global South were shamefully treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of ever-increasing pharmaceutical profit. It is therefore inevitable that the trust of the Global South in the West has plummeted.”
Dearden said pharmaceutical companies “continue to obstruct fair access to vaccines in their quest for higher profits” and called on wealthy countries including the UK to “stand up to big pharma” and support measures in the pandemic treaty negotiations “that would prevent this deep inequality from happening again and again”.
The US said it will donate 50,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine against mpox to the DRC. But in the longer term, health leaders at Africa CDC have said a sustainable supply chain, including manufacturing on the continent, will be needed.