President Joe Biden is facing criticism that his administration has moved too slowly to address the spread of a troubling new disease in the United States: monkeypox.
That criticism has echoed what former President Donald Trump faced in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Experts have accused the Biden administration of slow-walking vaccine distribution, failing to prioritize widespread testing, and bungling communications with the public about the virus.
The U.S. had 305 confirmed cases of monkeypox, a virus that leaves its victims with flulike symptoms and sores, as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 100 of those cases appear to have been recorded in the last week alone, suggesting the virus is spreading rapidly.
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Monkeypox is not typically found in the U.S. and is thought to come from the central and western regions of Africa.
But in recent months, the virus has surfaced in countries where it does not normally circulate, infecting people with no recent travel or connections to places where it does.
A handful of European countries have been hit especially hard. The United Kingdom, for example, had recorded 1,076 cases as of Tuesday. Spain had detected 800.
Experts say men who have sex with men, referred to as “MSM” in public health jargon, face the steepest risk of monkeypox infection, and advocates have called on the Biden administration to make vaccines widely available to members of the gay community.
Smallpox vaccines developed decades ago but no longer routinely offered to the public have been proven effective in protecting against monkeypox.
Doctors recorded the first case of monkeypox in the U.S. in mid-May when a Massachusetts man tested positive shortly after returning from Canada.
Several days later, Biden downplayed the threat of the disease when asked by a reporter whether the administration should do more to prepare for an outbreak.
“Thus far, there doesn’t seem to be a need for any kind of extra efforts beyond what’s going on,” Biden said on May 23.
A month later, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services had a very different assessment of the situation.
“All Americans should be concerned about monkeypox cases,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement last week.
Becerra announced that HHS would distribute monkeypox tests to five major commercial laboratories as the administration works to scale up testing capacity for the virus.
The CDC said Tuesday that it would activate its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate its response to the virus.
But the complaints about its monkeypox response had already begun to mount.
In New York City and Washington, D.C., authorities quickly ran out of the two-dose Jynneos smallpox vaccine shortly after offering appointments to the public.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine reacted with outrage to images last week of New Yorkers waiting for hours outside a health facility for the chance to secure a shot.
“This is far, far too little,” Levine said. He demanded the Biden administration “dramatically up our allocation [of the vaccine] ASAP.”
Other countries are ahead of the U.S. in terms of distributing smallpox vaccines to their most vulnerable citizens in the gay community.
The U.S. had just 36,000 doses of the Jynneos smallpox vaccine in the national stockpile at the beginning of the month, though the administration asked in early June for the vaccine’s manufacturer to send 36,000 more.
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In Canada, by contrast, the province of Quebec alone had 40,000 doses of the shot by mid-June.
The administration’s relatively slow progress toward addressing the monkeypox outbreak stands in stark contrast to how Biden campaigned in 2020 when he constantly pilloried Trump for the pace of his decisions at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The federal government must act swiftly and aggressively,” the Biden campaign said in 2020 of its pandemic plan.
