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'Crisis of Disrupted Care': Nearly 800,000 Mpox Vaccines Meant for Africa Wasted Due to Trump USAID Cuts
"For a vaccine to be shipped to a country, we need a minimum of six months before expiration to ensure that the vaccine can arrive in good condition and also allow the country to implement the vaccination," said Yap Boum, an Africa CDC deputy incident manager.
In September, the Biden administration pledged that the U.S. would provide more than 1 million doses to fight the epidemic in Africa, which has killed nearly 2,000 people, many of them children.
However, Politico reports that just 91,000 of them were delivered, and only 220,000 of them still have a long enough shelf life to be used if the Trump administration signs off on them.
The continent is already facing a dangerous shortage of mpox immunizations. As Science reported last month:
In September 2024, Africa CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) jointly issued an mpox "continental preparedness and response plan" that called for vaccinating 10 million people in Africa within 6 months. An updated version of the plan, issued in April, narrowed who should be offered the vaccine and scaled back the target to 6.4 million people by August.
But according to a May 29 WHO situation report, only 720,000 people in seven African countries have received mpox vaccines. Doses are scarce, vaccination teams are short on health workers and transportation, and identifying who might have been exposed to the mpox virus and should get the vaccine first is a challenge.
Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the Africa CDC's emergency consultative group, called Trump's "abrupt closure of USAID support for the mpox control effort in Africa" a "major blow, especially since it played a key role in the logistics of vaccine storage and distribution."
A June report by Public Citizen put the striking shortfall of doses into even greater perspective. The group reported that Africa had nearly six times fewer doses of the vaccine than the United States had during the 2022-23 outbreak, which was markedly less severe than what Africa currently faces.
Graphic: Public Citizen www.citizen.org
They pointed to high prices charged by the vaccine's manufacturer, Bavarian Nordic. The company has sold the vaccines to UNICEF for $65 per dose, making them the second most expensive drug UNICEF pays for.
UNICEF called for Bavarian Nordic to quarter the price of the drug and increase doses available to fight the crisis, but the company did not respond to the request. As a result, UNICEF fell 350,000 doses short of the one million that it had hoped to commit.
This shortfall was made worse by the actions taken by the Trump administration. While halting USAID operations, the U.S. also ceased cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO), which is a major player in organizing the allocation of vaccines.
The Trump administration's actions, the report said, have "prompted a concurrent crisis of disrupted care and severe funding shortfalls across a range of disease areas and health services."
Mpox vaccines are not the only form of international aid going to waste as a direct result of the Trump administration's cuts to USAID.
On Monday, Hana Kiros reported in The Atlantic that the Trump administration had given the order "to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it":
Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire [Tuesday], according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.
The Trump administration formally shut down USAID on July 1, after cancelling 83% of its programs at the beginning of Trump's term.
On the same day, a study was published in The Lancet, revealing that the organization's efforts over the past two decades had saved over 90 million lives, with the biggest reductions in mortality coming from its work to prevent HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other tropical diseases.
"Is [USAID] a good use of resources? We found that the average taxpayer has contributed about 18 cents per day to USAID," James Macinko, a health policy researcher at UCLA and study co-author, told NPR. "For that small amount, we've been able to translate that into saving up to 90 million deaths around the world."
According to Impact Counter, a database created by Brooke Nichols, associate professor of global health at the Boston University School of Public Health, nearly 250,000 children and 120,000 adults already had died over less than six months as a result of cuts to these programs, as of June 26.
According to the Lancet study, if those cuts extend into 2030, 14 million people who might otherwise have lived—including millions more children—might die.
"These deaths will not be the result of droughts, earthquakes, pandemics, or war," said Olivier De Schutter in a piece published Friday in Common Dreams. "They will be the direct consequence of a single, lethal decision made by one of the wealthiest men to ever walk this planet."
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