United States – The World Health Organisation was expected to convene an emergency session on Friday to deliberate on how affordable access to tests, treatment, and vaccines for mpox could be made available to the global community as the disease erupts in some parts of Africa and another part of the world.
Involvement of Key Global Health Partners
The meeting would involve members of an association of health professionals that coordinated the fight against COVID-19, as well as other health partners such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as reported by Reuters.
They will also talk about how similar mistakes seen during the COVID pandemic in relation to inequitable access to medical treatments, tests, and vaccines are not repeated during the mpox outbreak, said Ayoade Alakija, the chair of the meeting and a WHO special envoy.
Declaration of Global Health Emergency
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that mpox was an infectious disease public health emergency of international concern on Wednesday after an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo crossed borders. On Thursday, Sweden confirmed that they had recorded the first case outside Africa associated with the outbreak.
“We failed on product access last time, but we have learned those lessons … and I will make sure that equity (equal access) is the first thing we are thinking about (now),” Alakija said.
Ensuring Equity in Access
In COVID, middle-income and low-income countries were also left out as the upper-income countries purchased medical tools to mitigate the disease, particularly vaccines. That WHO-led alliance eventually delivered nearly two billion vaccines, hundreds of millions of tests, and hundreds of thousands of treatments to the global population.
Addressing Past Inequities
Mpox was also announced as a global health emergency in 2022 and also, the accessibility was not equal. For instance, while Europe and America received their vaccines some time ago, the same cannot be said for Africa two years later amid continuing acute outbreaks, as reported by Reuters.
Alakija pointed out that the fight against the disease was more than just vaccines as awareness campaigns such as polio campaigns could assist people in protecting protecting themselves from from HIV.