By Maggie Fick
LONDON (Reuters) -Danish biotech firm Bavarian Nordic is considering ramping up production of its mpox vaccine without having orders lined up, based on talks this week with the World Health Organisation, the company’s CEO told Reuters on Tuesday.
Chief Executive Officer Paul Chaplin said in an interview that the company urgently needs to make the call on whether to manufacture “at risk” – or without signed contracts – because diverting or switching manufacturing capacity from its other vaccines to mpox will take time.
In order to make that decision, Bavarian Nordic “would need to be reasonably convinced that those orders would be coming through”, Chaplin said. “We’ll have to wait and see how the discussions develop this week and we’ll make a decision later this week what we’re doing.”
He said the discussions were with the WHO, the global vaccine group Gavi, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and with individual governments in Africa and elsewhere.
Last week the WHO declared that an outbreak of mpox, a viral infection that spreads through close contact, represents a global health emergency for the second time in two years.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick;Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
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