Tecovirimat has also been approved in Europe for the treatment of monkeypox. One of the drugs, Tecovirimat, is already in the national stockpile, and the CDC is now developing treatment guidance to help public health authorities and clinicians administer it if needed, he said. Two FDA-approved antivirals for the treatment of smallpox can also be used in monkeypox, Brett Petersen, a medical officer in the CDC’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, told reporters Monday. Germany has ordered 40,000 doses, Reuters reported. has already started vaccinating people, with 1,000 doses of the vaccine, called Imvanex there, already administered. She said the agency has already requested some of those doses from the stockpile for patients’ contacts. “We expect that level to ramp up very quickly in the coming weeks as the company provides more doses to us,” McQuiston said of the Jynneos vaccine. national strategic stockpile has just over 1,000 Jynneos doses, approved by the FDA in 2019, as well as has some 100 million doses of an older smallpox vaccine that has more side effects, according to the CDC. The CDC said the viral disease monkeypox, thought to be spread by prairie dogs, has been detected in the Americas for the first time with about 20 cases reported in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. “This is one of the rare diseases where you can be vaccinated after exposure and it prevents you from getting sick,” said Eric Toner, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But the current strategy of containment, which includes vaccinating high-risk, close contacts of infected patients, could quickly strain the current Jynneos supply if cases rise. health officials say the country has a “good stock” of vaccines against monkeypox.
“We have a strong concern” that the virus is spreading differently, Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, told reporters during a briefing on Monday. After smallpox was globally eradicated in 1980 and those vaccinations stopped, monkeypox emerged, health officials say. When routine vaccination for smallpox was still happening globally, monkeypox wasn’t seen because the vaccine protected against both diseases. had two cases of monkeypox imported by travelers who had been to Nigeria, according to the CDC. Monkeypox cases outside the endemic region are very rare, typically brought to non-endemic countries by people coming from that area. On Tuesday, California said it was working with the agency to investigate an additional suspected case. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday it had confirmed one case of monkeypox in Massachusetts and is reviewing four cases from New York, Utah and Florida that it presumes are monkeypox. The U.K., Spain and Portugal have reported most cases of infection with the virus, which typically causes fever, rash and swollen lymph nodes. Health officials have confirmed more than 250 cases across 16 countries, most of them in Europe. The vaccines last for at least three years, he said. That’s nearly 50 million doses a year, Sørensen said. “Of course we don’t have stockpiles available for the entire planet, but just in the midterm and long term we will have quite a large capacity to produce vaccines,” he said. “We’re talking to a large number of countries that are putting in procurement requests to us as the problem is just spreading and increasing day by day,” said Rolf Sass Sørensen, the company’s vice president for investor relations and communication.īavarian Nordic is confident it can supply the doses needed - if the immediate and acute demand doesn’t skyrocket. “This basically is the largest cluster of monkeypox cases happening in multiple countries simultaneously outside of an endemic region,” said Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, a Cameroonian doctor based at Emory University in Atlanta.īavarian Nordic, the manufacturer of the monkeypox vaccine Jynneos approved by the Food and Drug Administration, told POLITICO that it has received calls from “many, many countries” wishing to purchase its shot.