Bavarian Nordic to send 500,000 doses of mpox vaccine to Africa

Bavarian Nordic has signed an agreement with Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and its partners to supply 500,000 doses of its MVA-BN mpox vaccine to African countries by the end of 2024.

The vaccines will be funded through Gavi’s First Response Fund, which the organization created in June 2024 to help purchase and deliver vaccines during health emergencies. The $500 million fund enables Gavi to rapidly respond to emergency declarations from the World Health Organization (WHO). The Fund was designed to improve upon the COVID-19 response, which experienced delays due to inequitable access to funding for low-income countries.

“The First Response Fund was designed in collaboration with Gavi donors and partners specifically to provide rapid early funding for emergencies such as mpox. Using it today to fund the first direct transaction for vaccines in support of equitable access and the global response, just over a month since mpox was declared a public health emergency, takes us a long way towards our goal of protecting those most at risk,” said Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

“We are committed to working with affected governments and our partners to turn these vaccines into vaccinations as quickly and effectively as possible and, over time, to build a global vaccine stockpile if sufficient funding is secured for Gavi’s work through 2030. We thank our donors for enabling us to act rapidly by committing funds to the First Response Fund before an emergency occurred.”

The news follows the push by Gavi, The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and other partners to secure mpox vaccines through an emergency tender that it announced earlier this month. Bavarian Nordic confirmed to BioProcess Insider at that time that it had been one of the organizations approached to supply vaccines to Africa.

Bavarian Nordic has been at the forefront of mpox related news as one of the few companies with an approved vaccine. On September 10, a shipment of more than 15,000 vaccines from the company arrived in Kinshasa, DRC. And last month, the company signed a contract with an undisclosed European country to supply 440,000 doses by the end of 2024. At the time of that signing, Paul Chaplin, president and CEO of Bavarian Nordic, promised that the company would still be on track to deliver 10 million doses by the end of 2025 to address the Public Health Emergency of International Concern declared by WHO.

Regarding the new agreement, Chaplin said, “We are pleased to sign this agreement and strengthen our commitment to support Gavi and other global health partners, who have demonstrated strong leadership in making life-saving vaccines available for the vulnerable populations in developing countries for decades.” He added that the doses will “significantly increase the availability of mpox vaccines for African countries.”