(Reuters) – Bavarian Nordic has received an order worth $63 million from the U.S. government to produce additional bulk product and the final freeze-dried doses of its mpox and smallpox vaccine, Jynneos, it said on Tuesday.
As per the contract, the Danish biotech company will manufacture 1 million freeze-dried vaccines to be delivered by 2026, it said.
The additional bulk product, representing the majority of the contract value, will help replenish the inventory used to manufacture vaccines in response to the mpox outbreak in 2022.
In August, the World Health Organization declared mpox a global public health emergency for the second time in two years, following an outbreak of the viral infection in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has spread to neighboring countries and beyond.
Mpox can spread through close contact. Usually mild, it is fatal in rare cases. It causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions on the body.
(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal and Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)
