(Nairobi) The head of the African Union’s health watchdog said on Thursday that the West must learn lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and urged not to abandon Africa in the face of the mpox epidemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared MPOX an international emergency in August, concerned about the increase in cases of the new Clade 1b strain in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC) said it had not met its target of raising $600 million to fight the virus, which is now present in 14 African countries.
To achieve this, “it is time for Western countries to show that they have learned the lessons of COVID-19,” noted its director, Jean Kaseya, expressing optimism on this point.
“We don’t want to come back to them tomorrow and say: you have abandoned Africa again,” he added during an online briefing on MPOX. “We want them to learn this lesson, it is time for them to rebuild trust.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Western countries have sometimes been accused of abandoning Africa by prioritizing richer countries for vaccines.
For Mr Kaseya, “trust was broken between Western countries and Africa” at that time, and faced with the “global problem” of mpox, “it is really time to show solidarity”.
In the DRC, by far the worst-affected country, nearly 22,000 cases and 716 deaths linked to the virus have been recorded since January, according to local authorities.
Mr Kaseya also stressed that testing remained a “major problem” and needed to be increased to better track the evolution of the epidemic.
So far, some 200,000 doses of vaccine have been delivered to the DRC by the European Union, and about 50,000 by the United States. The DRC has a population of about 100 million.
According to Mr Kaseya, several hundred thousand additional doses have been pledged by European countries, in addition to the approximately three million doses pledged by Japan.
He did not provide further details, including when the vaccines would be delivered.