Mpox Transparency and Accountability for the Global Response

27Jun 2025 by Melissa Slogan

Welcome to the sixteenth issue of our report, “Mpox: Transparency and Accountability for the Global Response.”

In the wake of the U.S. health agencies’ communications and foreign aid freezes, we hope to serve as a resource for transparency on emerging outbreaks globally while continuing to provide in-depth analysis of the mpox response. We will provide brief updates on emerging outbreaks with the state of available medical countermeasures and diagnostics needed to effectively respond.

Highlights:

Over 50% of pledged doses have been delivered to 11 countries, with reports of high vaccine acceptance in the 7 countries vaccinating: Nearly 3 million doses of mpox vaccines have been delivered across the DRC, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Angola, Rwanda, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Kenya, and South Africa. Seven of these countries (DRC, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia, Central African Republic and Nigeria) have started vaccination campaigns. The remaining four countries have not yet been able to deploy vaccines either due to funding constraints or case load (e.g. South Africa has not reported a case since February 2025). More than 698,000 people have been vaccinated with at least one dose with children aged 1-17 accounting for 22% of the total vaccinated. Additional vaccine doses are still needed to reach the 6.4 million doses needed for this phase of the response. 568,520 doses are available from Unicef and the USG based on prior agreements, but the doses from Unicef require funding to deploy and those from the USG require authorization to deploy. 104,000 of these doses (18.3%) have been allocated to Uganda and the DRC, but the DRC may not accept the USG vaccines due to short shelf-life (11-12 months).

Latest updates at a glance:

On June 9th, the World Health Organization announced that the mpox outbreak continues to meet the criteria of a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).

The Democratic Republic of Congo received 100,000 doses of the MVA-BN vaccine from France on May 30th, and 1.5 million doses of the LC-16 vaccine from Japan on May 31st.

Sierra Leone received 20,000 doses of the MVA-BN vaccine from the UAE on June 9rd.

Gavi and Unicef have funded a shipment of 97,660 doses to be delivered to Uganda in June.

Africa CDC’s incident support management team (IMST) leads visited Sierra Leone to provide support for the mpox response including: financial support; deployments of community health workers for surveillance, infection prevention and control, and risk communication and community engagement; laboratory reinforcement; data harmonization and health system digitalization.

Vaccination started in Kinshasha using the LC16 vaccine on June 14th.

The DRC, Uganda, and Sierra Leone accounted for 91% of all confirmed cases on the continent over the last 6 weeks and a consistent downward trend in the number of cases has been observed in all three countries.

The US reported a new case of clade I mpox on June 17th. The individual recently traveled to a region experiencing active clade I transmission.

Bavarian Nordic has begun a clinical trial evaluating the safety and immunogenicity of the MVA-BN vaccine in infants and children under 2 years old, and pregnant or breastfeeding women.

Emerging outbreaks:

Cholera: There is an active cholera outbreak in 21 member states and cumulatively in 2025 there have been 168,975 cases and 3,378 deaths reported. Four member states (Angola, DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan) contributed to 85% of all cases and 92% of all deaths in 2025. Children continue to bear a high burden of infection with up to 47% of all cases and 37% of deaths. In all four countries, the case fatality rate is high with all countries reporting close to 2% and above highlighting the need for accelerated response. Other public health outbreaks in the continent include measles, dengue and lassa fever.