The first 10,000 mpox vaccines are finally due to arrive next week in Africa, where a dangerous new strain of the virus - which has afflicted people there for decades - has caused global alarm.

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 Organization (WHO) until this month to start officially the process needed to give poor countries easy access to large quantities of vaccine via international agencies.

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