The slow arrival of the shots, which have already been made available in more than 70 countries outside Africa, showed that lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about global healthcare inequities have been slow to bring change, half a dozen public health officials and scientists said.

Among the hurdles: It took the World Health Organisation (WHO) until this month to start officially the process needed to give poor countries easy access to large quantities of vaccines via international agencies.

That could have begun years ago, several of the officials and scientists told Reuters.

Mpox is a potentially deadly infection that causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and spreads through close physical contact.

It was declared a global health emergency by the WHO on August 14 after the new strain, known as clade Ib, began to proliferate from Democratic Republic of Congo to neighbouring African countries.

--Reuters--