(The Defender)—The World Health Organization (WHO) today approved the first mpox vaccine for use in adults — and also said it can be used for babies, children, teens and pregnant women if they are in “outbreak settings where the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks.”
WHO’s approval of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine will help governments and international agencies such as the Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and UNICEF, buy it, MedicalXpress reported.
The MVA-BN vaccine — short for “Modified Vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic” — is a smallpox/mpox vaccine. It is sold in the U.S. under the name Jynneos.
WHO Assistant Director-General Yukiko Nakatani said, “The decision can also help national regulatory authorities to fast-track approvals, ultimately increasing access to quality-assured mpox vaccine products.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker called the WHO’s approval of the shot for infants and children in Africa “a train wreck in the making.”
Hooker told The Defender:
“The safety profile is abysmal in adults (up to 2.1% serious cardiac events in clinical trials) and the vaccine has not been adequately tested for efficacy or safety in pediatric populations.
“In other words, the WHO has no idea whether it will work nor do they know how much damage it will do. The WHO has again abandoned good public health principles and waved their magic vaccine wand on the mpox outbreak.”
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant, also criticized the WHO for overly focusing on mpox vaccines and neglecting to address broader public health issues in Africa.
“So far this year, about 40,000 children have died from malaria in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] alone, and similar numbers of people from malnutrition, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDs,” Bell said.
Although these numbers “obviously dwarf” the number of mpox deaths, the WHO is allocating fewer resources to addressing them.
Bell — who formerly served as a medical officer and scientist at the WHO — explained what he sees occurring:
“We have become much better at detecting much rarer diseases such as mpox, and addressing these is certainly more lucrative for the growing industry feeding off the WHO’s misinformation regarding rapidly rising pandemic risk.
“However, it is clear that the people of DRC and Africa in general would benefit far more if WHO returned to impactful public health. There has been a move over recent years to a concentration on addressing the symptoms of diseases of poverty (which mpox is) with Western-developed commodities, rather than dealing with underlying causes.
“This signals a return to colonialist-era approaches rather than evidence-based public health. It presumably reflects the way WHO is now funded, with increasing control from the private sector and a few large Western nations with large Pharma industries.”
No clinical trials on kids
In its press release, the WHO said the MVA-BN vaccine can be administered to adults over 18 as a two-dose injection four weeks apart but can also be given as a single dose “in supply-constrained outbreak situations.”
“While MVA-BN is currently not licensed for persons under 18 years of age,” it said, “this vaccine may be used ‘off-label’ in infants, children and adolescents, and in pregnant and immunocompromised people.”
The WHO called for more data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in these situations.
The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization — which reviewed all available evidence and recommended the use of MVA-BN vaccine — noted in its Weekly Epidemiological Record report that “MVA-BN has not been specifically studied in clinical trials in children.”
However, they said:
“The same non-replicating MVA viral vector is used as a platform for other vaccines that include MVA-filo (Mvabea™) against Ebola virus disease (EVD).
“The EVD vaccine is approved by the EU for adults and children aged 1 year and older. Data from 5 published studies on MVA-BN as a viral vector platform for the prevention of EVD, with a total population of 52 229 children, support the favourable safety profile of the product.”
The authors of a new study — published Sept. 11 in The BMJ — presented results on MVA-BN’s effectiveness in adult males but said nothing about children or pregnant women.
In 2023, researchers funded by the UK Health Security Agency looked at the health outcomes of 87 children who received a single dose of MVA-BN.
They reported that the vaccine was “well tolerated” but that larger studies needed to be done to fully assess the shot’s safety and efficacy in kids.
The Defender asked Bavarian Nordic for information about its mpox vaccine in pediatric populations but did not receive a response by the deadline.
The WHO’s process for granting a drug “prequalification” approval for “emergency use listing” requires drugmakers to “commit to continue generating missing information to fulfill prequalification requirements.”
“Once this information becomes available,” the WHO said, “a PQ [prequalification] application should be submitted to complete the full process to achieve recommendation for international procurement in both emergency and non-emergency settings.”
It is unclear how much pediatric safety and efficacy data Bavarian Nordic has collected so far and what it showed.
Mpox vaccine approved for U.S. kids and teens since 2022
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 granted emergency use authorization for the vaccine for “in individuals less than 18 years of age determined to be at high risk for monkeypox infection.”
Jynneos has been licensed for use in U.S. adults since 2019.
The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC)’s mpox vaccination website states that while teens and children at risk for mpox can receive Jynneos, it is not recommended for babies under 6 months.
The CDC also says Jynneos can be given to pregnant or breastfeeding women.
Although it remains unknown if Jynneos may pose risks to a developing fetus if taken during pregnancy, animal studies haven’t shown any harm to developing fetuses when the vaccine was given to pregnant animals, the agency said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
