The US Monkeypox Response Is Not Going Well. Did We Learn Nothing From Covid?

Experts describe a lag on vaccines, treatments, and testing.

Bill O'Leary/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Two months after monkeypox reemerged in the United States this year, health officials and physicians are reporting delays and limited availability of tests, vaccines, and treatments against the virus. For many working in healthcare, it’s déjà vu.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, you may recall, the federal government struggled to provide Covid testing across the country. (My colleagues put together an extensive timeline of the Trump administration’s early pandemic response, or lack thereof, here.) But unlike Covid, monkeypox isn’t new to the world (it’s considered endemic in parts of Africa). So at least in theory, the US could have been well-prepared for an outbreak.

Now, monkeypox has infected about 1,500 people across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with hotspots in New York, California, and Illinois. So far, the virus has spread primarily among men who have sex with men, but the CDC cautions that anyone who has close contact with someone with monkeypox can contract the virus, which causes smallpox-like symptoms including fever, headache, chills, and a pimple-like rash. No deaths have been reported in the US. 

The Biden administration, for its part, says it is "incredibly focused" on issuing vaccines and is working on expanding testing. But many experts are expressing their frustration with how slow the process has gone.

First, there's the vaccine: As CNN reported on Thursday, there are approximately 1.5 million people who are eligible to receive Jynneos, a vaccine that protects against monkeypox and smallpox. So far, more than 132,000 doses have been distributed, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, but health officials on the ground say it hasn't been enough. “We got an allotment of 200 vaccines," Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer of the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Health, told CNN, "and the appointments for that went in about an hour and a half."

Similarly, New York Mayor Eric Adams has also said the city hasn't received enough vaccine doses, even as it reportedly makes up about a third of all monkeypox cases nationwide. "While we appreciate the approximately 7,000 vaccine doses that have been sent to New York City thus far, and the approximately 14,500 vaccine doses we expect to receive by the end of the week, we urgently need far more to slow [the] spread and protect at risk populations," Adams wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden on Monday. "Within less than 10 minutes of releasing new appointments for our vaccine clinics last week, all appointments were taken."

Obtaining monkeypox treatments and tests has also been a headache for local health officials. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that in order to prescribe the antiviral Tpoxx to patients, doctors say they must fill out dozens of pages of paperwork per patient. “There’s a ton of paperwork, there’s a ton of assessments that are required, there’s a tremendous amount that one has to do to be able to administer this drug to someone," Roy Gulick, a New York City physician told the Post.

A lack of available tests means that the country is probably behind in counting cases. “I think one of the challenges that we have is that we’re simply not doing enough testing," Dr. Carlos del Rio, the executive associate dean at Emory University School of Medicine, told CNN, "so there probably are much more cases than we actually are currently registering."

While the Biden administration announced late last month that expanded testing would soon be available through commercial labs, doctors like Dr. Libby Hohmann, an infectious-disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital told the Post that her hospital was still relying on state labs for its monkeypox testing. "The testing is limited," she said.

This may all sound sadly familiar. As New York City Councilman Erik Bottcher told the New York Times, “I think it’s embarrassing for us as a country that immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic we’re getting caught off guard by another pandemic and we’re unable to address it properly.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate