Monkeypox Outbreak, Expert Says No Need For Mass Vaccination

Vaccination illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/WHO Blink Media/Nana Kofi Acquah)

JAKARTA - South African disease experts do not see the need for a global mass vaccination campaign against monkeypox, or believe that cases will explode in the same way as COVID-19.

As of Wednesday, South Africa had not recorded any confirmed or suspected cases of monkeypox, a mild viral infection endemic in parts of West and Central Africa.

But local health authorities are on alert, after more than 200 suspected and confirmed cases of the virus, the majority in Europe, have been detected in at least 19 countries since early May.

The monkeypox variant implicated in the current outbreak has a case fatality rate of around 1 percent, although no deaths have been reported so far.

"Right now, we don't really need a mass vaccine campaign," Adrian Puren, executive director of South Africa's National Institute for Infectious Diseases (NICD), told a news conference.

Puren further said that the use of vaccines should be prioritized for other infections that are more pathogenic or deadly.

"We need what vaccine agenda should be prioritized and how to approach it, because once again there is a limited amount of funding that can go into vaccines," said Puren.

"I understand the pressure, but I think in this particular context we just need to be careful."

Meanwhile, Jacqueline Weyer of NICD's Center for Emerging Zoonotic and Parasitic Diseases said she believes the current outbreak of monkeypox outside Africa can be contained more quickly through testing, contact tracing, monitoring and isolation than through vaccination.

He said, among 11 monkeypox cases that were subject to genome sequencing, there was almost no change from the virus cases recognized in Nigeria in recent years.

"So nothing strange, nothing we haven't seen before except now it's happening in a different place."

Monkeypox is not as contagious as the virus that causes COVID-19 and health authorities can contain it by applying techniques similar to those used to control the spread of Ebola, Weyer added.

Meanwhile, Oxford University Professor Moritz Kraemer said at a separate seminar, it was very difficult to predict the trajectory of monkeypox cases.

"It's too early to do any modeling," he said.

Key questions that still need to be answered include: when people transmit monkeypox, is it contagious before symptoms are visible, how many close contacts later test positive and how quickly they test positive, Kraemer said, adding answers would be needed for robust modeling.