White House Declares Public Health Emergency For Monkeypox Amid Vaccination Struggles

Topline

The White House declared monkeypox a public health emergency on Thursday and announced a potential new strategy to increase vaccine dose availability as cases climb and the federal government faces mounting criticism over its management of the outbreak.

A healthcare worker prepares to administer a monkeypox vaccine.

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Key Facts

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra declared the emergency during a press conference Thursday, pledging to take the White House response to the virus “to the next level.”

Officials said the declaration will allow the federal government to receive outbreak data more quickly from states and will help the U.S. deploy more healthcare workers to fight the virus and improve access to care.

It could also help expedite access to emergency funding and help federal agencies allocate more money to vaccine and drug development.

HHS has also been working with Bavarian Nordic to accelerate the availability of vaccines, and is considering a possible strategy called “dose-sparing” to allow healthcare providers to extract five separate vaccine doses from a one-dose vial by changing the method of vaccine administration, according to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf.

The declaration comes after several cities and states like New York and California had moved on their own to designate the virus—which has disproportionately affected men who have sex with men, and in particular those with multiple partners—as an emergency, part of a bid to streamline government responses.

Big Number

6,617. That’s how many confirmed cases of monkeypox and orthopoxvirus—the class of viruses that monkeypox belongs to—were reported across the U.S. as of Wednesday, according to the CDC. Cases have been confirmed in every state except Montana and Wyoming.

Key Background

The World Health Organization declared monkeypox—a virus that can result in painful lesions, chills, fever, headache and other symptoms—a public health emergency of international concern two weeks ago, as cases have increased rapidly since early May. Monkeypox is endemic to parts of Africa, where several deaths from the virus have occurred this year, though outbreaks there have typically received little international attention. According to officials, to date, the White House has distributed more than 600,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine, the only shot U.S. regulators have specifically approved for monkeypox. The U.S. has begun to make 1.1 million shots of the two-shot Jynneos vaccine available to jurisdictions, still less than a third of the vaccines needed for people at highest risk of contracting the virus, according to multiple outlets. Major cities in the U.S., including New York City and San Francisco, have been scrambling to get enough doses to vaccinate at-risk populations, in some cases delaying the second shot of the two-dose regimen to ensure more people can receive the first dose of the vaccine.

Contra

The federal government has faced criticism in recent weeks for its approach to ordering and distributing monkeypox vaccines. The U.S. relies on a small Danish biotechnology company called Bavarian Nordic for the Jynneos shots, which the U.S. had invested more than $1 billion in to help develop. The New York Times reports that in early May, as the virus began to spread, HHS waited too long to ask that vaccines the U.S. already bought be bottled for distribution, and by the time the agency did, Bavarian Nordic was too busy assisting other clients to fill the U.S. order for months. At the same time, failing to predict a spike in monkeypox cases, HHS allowed Bavarian Nordic to give 215,000 vaccine doses it owned to European countries instead of keeping them for the U.S, the Times reported. In an earlier investigation, the Times found the U.S. also had 20 million doses of Jynneos in its national stockpile, but failed to refill most of those doses as they expired.

What To Watch For

The U.S. has ordered 6.9 million doses of the Jynneos vaccine in total, but many of those doses are not set to arrive until next year. The U.S. will receive another 150,000 doses from the Strategic National Stockpile in September, according to officials. After that, the next shipments of vaccines are not expected to arrive until October because the administration waited too long to ask for some hundreds of thousands of doses to be bottled, after several other countries had already sent in their orders, according to the Times.