The European Union will sign an agreement to buy some 110,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine during the day, Stella Kiriakidis, the European commissioner for health, said in Luxembourg on Tuesday.
Arriving at a meeting of EU health ministers in Luxembourg, Kiriakid said the vaccine, which is scheduled to be signed on Tuesday, would buy the vaccines from EU funds and be delivered to EU member states from the end of June. She added that this would be the first time the EU committee had mobilized EU funds to buy vaccines and then distribute the vaccines among member states.
About 900 cases of monkeypox have been registered in the European Union so far.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced in early June that it was in contact with the Danish biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic about the analysis of experimental data that could support the authorization of the Imvanex vaccine for monkeypox.
Some EU Member States, including Germany and Spain, are reported to have already prescribed a vaccine against monkeypox.
At their one-day meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday, EU health ministers will study, among other things, the European Commission’s proposal to update the EU’s current global health strategy, in the light of health developments in recent years, including the crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic. In addition, the state of play of the draft EU regulation on cross-border threats to health is being discussed.
MTI
