The White House is working with multiple companies to bottle monkeypox vaccines, but the earliest estimates put the distribution at late 2022 to early 2023, two senior Biden administration officials and two other sources familiar with the matter told Politico.
Supply for about 12 million monkeypox doses are in the national stockpile, Politico reported, but more "finish and fill" facilities are needed to package the liquid.
On Aug. 11, the number of national monkeypox cases surpassed 10,000, twice as many as Spain, the next hardest-hit country.
For months, states and cities have been running low on Jynneos monkeypox vaccines, prompting the FDA to clear the way for each dose to be split into fifths Aug. 9. The strategy, which is based on one 2015 study that found it to have a similar efficacy to a full vaccine, would inject the dose between layers of skin rather than under them.
Only about a third of Jynneos doses needed for the 3.2 million people at high risk for monkeypox have been ordered, and the next shipment isn't due until October. One of the reasons for the delay is because Bavarian Nordic, a Denmark-based vaccine manufacturer, is the only pharmaceutical company in the world with an authorized monkeypox vaccine.