President Joe Biden has formed a team led by two veteran public health experts to lead the national response to the monkeypox outbreak, which has led to nearly 6,000 cases since mid-May.
Robert Fenton, a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will serve as the White House monkeypox coordinator. With him, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the Division of HIV Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an expert in health issues affecting gay and transgender people, will serve as deputy coordinator.
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“Bob’s experience in federal and regional response coordination, and Demetre’s vast knowledge of our public health systems’ strengths and limits will be instrumental as we work to stay ahead of the virus and advance a whole-of-government response,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said.
The White House has come under pressure in recent weeks to ramp up its efforts to combat the growing monkeypox outbreak in the United States, which has outpaced that of every other country. As of Monday, 5,811 cases had been reported, counting all states except Montana and Wyoming.
Fenton and Daskalakis have been tasked with coordinating and managing “response efforts across the White House and all Federal departments and agencies,” working with local, state, national, and international stakeholders on tracking and fighting the spread of the virus. They will also work “with state and local partners to ensure they have adequate supplies to test, treat and vaccinate at-risk individuals, with clinicians and providers on available testing, treatment and vaccination options, and with stakeholder communities on building public understanding of the virus and how to address it most effectively.”
The administration appointments come a day after California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared states of emergency over monkeypox on Monday, following New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s declaration last week. While monkeypox is not airborne like COVID-19 nor as fatal, it causes severe pain.
Monkeypox spreads primarily through close contact with lesions and bodily fluids from an infected person or materials used by an infected person. Most cases have been confirmed among men who have sex with men, who have reported rashes and lesions near the genitals, causing many healthcare professionals to mistake the virus for a sexually transmitted infection.
The declarations expand the pool of healthcare workers authorized to administer the Jynneos vaccine, which is meant for smallpox but also works against monkeypox. But the supply of vaccines in the U.S. remains low after a decade-old tranche of about 20 million doses in the national stockpile expired.
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Federal regulators gave the go-ahead last week to begin importing doses of the Jynneos vaccine from a Bavarian Nordic plant in Denmark. The administration has so far made 1.1 million doses of vaccine available to states, which then decide how the doses should be distributed. The administration has also ramped up testing capacity from around 6,000 tests performed per week to over 80,000 tests per week.
