Spain will donate 500,000 Mpox vaccine doses to countries in central Africa suffering from a surge in cases, the government said Tuesday.
The doses amount to 20 percent of Spain’s total mpox vaccine reserves, the health ministry said in a statement without specifying which nations in the region will receive the vaccines or when they will arrive.
Spain also urged its European Union peers to follow suit and also donate 20 percent of their mbox vaccine stockpile, saying it” makes no sense to stockpile vaccines where there is no problem,” the statement added.
France and Germany have both announced they will each donate 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries suffering from the emergency.
Formerly known as monkeypox, mpox is an infectious disease caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals that can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.
While that was the first case in Europe, the patient had been infected during a visit to an affected African country.
AFP
