Canada to donate 'up to 200,000' doses of mpox vaccine

By Anna Mehler Paperny

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada is donating "up to 200,000" doses of mpox vaccine, a government spokesperson said on Wednesday. 

The World Health Organization declared mpox a global health emergency last month, for the second time in two years. 

The number of doses of the vaccine Imvamune to be donated by Canada will depend on the receiving countries' capacity for storage and administration, a spokesperson for Canada's international development minister told Reuters.

Such donations are meant to address the vast inequity that left African nations with no access to the shots used during the global outbreak in 2022.

Mpox can spread through close contact. Usually mild, it is fatal in rare cases. It causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions on the body.

An outbreak in Congo began with the spread of an endemic strain, known as clade I. But a new variant, clade Ib, appears to spread more easily through routine close contact, including sexual contact.

It has spread from Congo to neighboring countries including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, triggering the action from the WHO.

Canada would not say to whom it would deliver the vaccines, or in what time frame. 

"Canada is working closely with global health experts, including GAVI (the international vaccine alliance) and the WHO, to access the scope of the outbreak and identify how best to deliver vaccines as soon as possible to those who need them most," the government spokesperson wrote in an email. "We will provide more details once a delivery timeline has been finalized." 

Health Canada has previously refused to say how many mpox vaccine doses the country has “for national security reasons,” saying only, “Canada has secured sufficient supply of mpox vaccines to support provincial and territorial programmes for the prevention and control of mpox in Canada.”

Based on previous years’ announcements from manufacturer Bavarian Nordic, Adam Houston, medical policy and advocacy adviser for Médecins Sans Frontières Canada, figures Canada has, at a conservative estimate, more than 2 million doses of mpox vaccine. 

“We'd like to see Canada first be more transparent about its own supplies and its own needs," Houston said before news of the donation was made public. "And then we'd like to see transparency on its plans for what it's going to do with these vaccines. We think the priority is that vaccines should be shared.” 

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny in Toronto; Editing by Matthew Lewis)