The World Health Organization WHO decided on Wednesday to classify the outbreak of mpox in several African countries as an international health emergency.
This has caused the stock of the Danish company Bavarian Nordic to surge by up to 17 percent on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. The company is one of the few that has an approved vaccine against mpox, the infectious disease previously known as monkeypox.
The company reports that it can deliver 10 million doses of vaccine to African countries by 2025 and that it currently has 300,000 doses ready for delivery.
The variant of mpox that is now spreading in Africa, called clade 1, is believed to be both more contagious and deadly than clade 2. The latter variant emerged in 2022 and is also found in Sweden.
