The shots will be sent to areas across the country with the highest numbers of cases, White House officials said Tuesday.
surge in the U.S., the Biden administration will start distributing the monkeypox vaccine across the country, focusing on people most at risk and communities with the highest numbers of cases, White House officials announced Tuesday.
The CDC is prioritizing initial access to the vaccine for people who have been in close contact, including sexual contact, with someone who has diagnosed with the virus. The agency will also provide vaccines to men who have sex with men who report having had multiple recent sex partners at a venue or party where the virus is known to have spread, or who have had sex with multiple partners in an area of the country with elevated spread.
“Monkeypox is not novel,” Jha said at the briefing. “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.”The U.S. monkeypox outbreak was first detected in Massachusetts in May, after a person who had been traveling tested positive. Since then, the virus has been spreading around the country, with more than 306 cases in 28 states, according to the CDC.
The Biden administration's vaccine strategy is welcome, but questions remain about how the doses will make it to"those most at-risk in an equitable way," NCSD's Harvey said in a statement after the briefing. In the current outbreak, the monkeypox virus is being spread primarily through intimate contact, including sex and prolonged face-to-face interactions, Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, the deputy director of the CDC’s High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology Division, said at the briefing.Epidemiologists who have studied monkeypox are concerned that the CDC’s numbers don’t reflect the true scope of the outbreak and that the U.S. may be reacting too slowly to stop case numbers from escalating.