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The Biden administration is ramping up its response to the monkeypox outbreak in the United States by shoring up supplies of vaccines and expanding access to tests at commercial labs.
A total of 1.3 million additional doses of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine to prevent monkeypox infection will be added to the strategic national stockpile throughout 2022, on top of the 64,000 doses already procured. The Biden administration will initially make 56,000 doses of the vaccine available to states and jurisdictions with rates of high transmission.
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In the coming weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services is also expecting another 240,000 doses of vaccines to be made available to a wider swathe of people at high risk of contracting the virus. The agency will hold another 60,000 in its reserves and is in consistent contact with the vaccine’s manufacturer about accelerating the shipment of more doses as needed.
“Most of the things that we can do we actually are in the process of doing or have already done,” said Dr. David Boucher, director of infectious disease preparedness and response at HHS.
The Biden administration is also scaling up diagnostic testing, which is available at commercial labs. Testing capacity has jumped from 6,000 tests processed per week up to 10,000 per week.
“Let me be very clear: We have plenty of testing capacity, and we will continue to both expand that testing capacity,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “We recently added five major commercial labs, and we’re going to continue to make it easier and easier for clinicians to access that capacity.”
The virus spreads through close skin-to-skin contact and has been seen more frequently in gay and bisexual men and men who have sex with men. The vaccines in the strategic national stockpile are effective as a prophylactic but can also be administered after a person has been exposed, stopping infection in its tracks.
“In terms of where we are with our current strategy given our current supply, we are looking at people who have previously been exposed and know it through contact tracing or previously been exposed by virtue of the fact that there was a monkeypox case in a venue that they had been at but don’t definitively know that they have been exposed,” said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky.
The CDC updated its tally of monkeypox cases in the U.S. on Tuesday. The agency has identified 306 cases across 28 jurisdictions. Despite the speedy increase in cases over the past few weeks, the Biden administration encouraged calm.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Unlike COVID of two years ago, monkeypox is a virus that’s been around forever,” Jha said. “We’ve known about it for at least 60-some-odd years, and we’ve spent years studying and treating monkeypox in endemic nations.”
