[AFRICANEWS] Congolese authorities said that 50,000 doses of smallpox vaccine from the United States arrived on Tuesday, a week after the first batch arrived from the European Union.
Adults in Equateur, South Kivu and Sankuru, the three provinces most affected, will be vaccinated first, starting on October 2, Cris Kacita Osako, coordinator of the Congolese Committee for the Fight against Monkeypox, told the Associated Press.
Last week, the first batch of smallpox vaccine arrived in the capital of Congo, the center of the epidemic. The 100,000 doses of JYNNEOS vaccine, manufactured by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, were donated by the European Union through HERA, the Union's agency for health emergencies. A further 100,000 doses were delivered over the weekend.
The 50,000 doses from the USA will be of the same JYNNEOS vaccine.
These 250,000 doses represent only a fraction of the three million doses which, according to the authorities, are needed to put an end to the smallpox epidemics in Congo, the epicenter of the global health emergency. EU countries have pledged to donate a further 500,000 doses, but the timetable for their delivery is unclear.
Since the start of 2024, 5,549 cases of smallpox have been confirmed on the continent, with 643 associated deaths,
[that's an epidemic?]
representing a sharp increase in the number of infections and deaths compared with previous years.Cases in Congo accounted for 91% of the total. Most smallpox cases in Congo and Burundi, the second most affected country, involve children under the age of 15.
[What happened 15 years ago...Oh yeah, Obama]
Last week, the African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization launched a continent-wide response plan to the smallpox epidemic, three weeks after the WHO declared epidemics in 12 African countries a global emergency.
JYNNEOS vaccine is approved and recommended by CDC and ACIP for the prevention of mpox and smallpox. During the ongoing clade II MPXV outbreak (i.e., outbreak that began in 2022 affecting predominantly gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men), JYNNEOS has been the main vaccine used in the United States.
ACAM2000 vaccine is approved for immunization against smallpox and could be made available for use against mpox under an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug (EA-IND) protocol. In the United States, there is a large supply of ACAM2000, but this vaccine has more known side effects and contraindications. 
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