Monkeypox: The company that makes the vaccine can’t keep up with the demands

Bavarian Nordic, the only pharmaceutical company in the world to produce a monkeypox vaccine approved by the relevant authorities, he said of no longer be sure that you have sufficient resources to support demand. According to Bloomberg, the Danish company is therefore considering outsourcing some production, transferring the technology to a US contract manufacturer and thereby increasing productivity enough to support the increase in cases occurring around the world. Rolf Sass Sorensen, vice-president of the company, was contacted by Bloomberg and said it is “A very dynamic market situation“. “The demand continues to grow – Sorensen said – and it is no longer certain that we can continue to satisfy it even with the upgrade of our existing production site in Denmark”, Located about forty kilometers from Copenhagen.

The outsourcing of production would represent a clear turnaround for the Danish company, which so far he has always ensured that he can manage all production directly from its Danish headquarters and has repeatedly specified that transferring its technology somewhere else would be too expensive and time-consuming. However, since the World Health Organization called monkeypox a global health emergency and thousands of people in over seventy countries have contracted it, demand for the vaccine has grown a lot and some countries, such as the UK, have grown in demand for the vaccine. they made it known that they had a shortage of doses. For this reason, Bavarian Nordic now deems it necessary expand its production range.

“We are looking for ways to get help from partners at all stages of vaccine manufacturing“- said Sorensen -. We have no concrete negotiations underway, but we are looking at what options there are ”. The vaccine – known as Jynneos in the United States and Imvanex in Europe – was developed for common smallpox, but in 2019 it was approved by the European Medicines Agency (Ema) and the US Food and Drug Administration (Fda) also for the variant of the virus now known as monkeypox (monkeypox). With current resources, Bavarian – the world’s only manufacturer of the drug – can produce around 30 million doses per year. Company CEO Paul Chaplin told the Danish newspaper Borsen that to put on a potential outsourcing of manufacturing to the US there it would take at least three months.