 |
| Photo Credit: Sky news |
A number of advocates and infectious disease experts have expressed concern over the seemingly slow response of the Biden administration to the monkeypox outbreak, noting that the U.S. may lose control of the disease.
The Hill
reported that experts and advocates are saying that the response to monkeypox
is mirroring the worst parts of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic,
with severely limited testing and a sluggish rollout of vaccines leading to a
virus that’s spreading undetected.
“Where we
have lagged is streamlining testing, making vaccines available, streamlining
access to the best therapeutics. All three areas have been bureaucratic and
slow, and that means we haven’t contained this outbreak,” said David Harvey,
executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD), according
to The Hill.
Biden
administration officials said they are confident they would deal with the
situation, adding that they have vaccines that are highly effective against it.
“We as a
global community have known about it for decades. We know how it spreads. We
have tests that help identify people who are infected. We have vaccines that
are highly effective against it,” White House coronavirus response coordinator
Ashish Jha said during a recent briefing, according to The Hill.
The Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that there are 460 cases in
30 states, Puerto Rico and D.C., according to The Hill. That number is being
contested by experts who argue that many people do not have access to
widespread testing and hence the numbers could be far higher.
Critics
noted that the administration has not learnt any lessons from the Coronavirus
pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and is still
killing more citizens till date even though the numbers are reducing.
“We’ve been
sort of screaming for a month about how bad the diagnostic situation is for
monkeypox. And that really was a clear error, preventable, and it’s very clear
that this administration has not learned lessons from early COVID,” said James
Krellenstein, co-founder of the HIV treatment advocacy group Prep4All,
according to The Hill.
The Hill
reported that Jon Andrus, an adjunct professor of global health at George
Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, said the U.S.
is lucky that monkeypox is not as contagious as COVID-19, or as deadly, because
the public health system is underfunded and overly fractured.
“I think
we’ll continue to repeat these mistakes because that’s been our track record.
That’s been our track record. We’ve had, what, more than five or six waves of
COVID, and we seem every time to be a little bit caught off guard,” Andrus said,
The Hill reported. “Stopping transmission requires that we’re all reading from
the same page. We all have the same road map.”
The Biden
administration has increased testing capacity from about 8,000 tests a week to
10,000 in a bid to identify cases and tackle the problem
The White
House is providing tens of thousands of doses of lynneos, the only FDA approved
vaccine specifically for monkeypox, according to The Hill.
More than a
million doses will be made available throughout the year just as the CDC is broadening
the eligibility criteria so individuals with confirmed monkeypox exposures and
presumed exposures can be vaccinated rather than only those who have a
confirmed case.