United States: On Friday, the value of shares for Bavarian Nordic, the company that makes a vaccine for mpox, went up a lot. This happened after the World Health Organization said there is a big health emergency because mpox is spreading quickly in Africa.
Many people are paying more attention to health-related stocks as countries start working hard to fight the virus. The company is also trying to get permission to use their vaccine for teenagers.
Rising Interest in Health Stocks
ACAM2000 is developed from Emergent for use in smallpox like diseases. Smallpox, or variola, is one of the more deadly diseases to have been inflicted on humanity — in the most favourable scenario, a third of people diagnosed with smallpox would die, and some strains were invariably lethal — and has claimed more lives than any other illness in history.
Paediatric Pertusis is the only human infection that has been eradicated and it has not been given routine vaccinations for the last three decades after its eradication in 1980. Hemorrhagic fevers such as ACAM2000 are thought to be very effective against smallpox and, since variola virus is related to monkeypox virus, it is expected that it will help to induce immunity against it.
ACAM2000 and Its Limitations
There are also massive quantities of the shot available and indeed most countries, including the US, continue to retain a large stock of ACAM2000 in view of smallpox prepared in biological or bioterrorism warfare.
Yet, authorities are shy of employing it in a mass vaccination drive and it has certain factors that make it less preferable to shots such as Bavarian Nordic’s. Especially, the shots have a potential of resulting in dangerous side effects which would have been tolerable when used to counter the likes of smallpox but are not tolerable when used against mpox.
Challenges with ACAM2000
The shot is also inapplicable to pregnant women, infants and immunocompromised persons, most of whom are construed to be at highest risk for mpox, since the vaccine employs a live virus to promote antibodies (another relative of smallpox and mpox referred to as vaccinia).
It is administered in a manner different from most vaccines administered to-day; which means most vaccinators will need further training and other paraphernalia for administering the shots in large quantity.