The White House plans to distribute more than one million monkeypox vaccine doses in the next few months. Public health experts are looking to the worldwide coronavirus response as a guide for what not to do this time around.
- Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the United States has been very slow to roll out testing for the virus, which “is very much a concern.”
- Bollyky said the U.S. government fortunately invested in vaccines that had been developed for smallpox and that received FDA approval to treat monkeypox after a small outbreak of the disease in the past. However, the country has been slow to obtain doses.
- Compared to Covid-19, monkeypox is older, spreads less efficiently and kills far fewer people, he said.
Watch the interview for more:
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Research Scientist Dr. Margaret Mills sets up an instrument that extracts DNA for monkeypox virus testing at the UW Medicine Virology Laboratory on July 12, 2022 in Seattle, Washington. The UW Medicine Virology Laboratory is one of a handful of clinical reference labs in the country to offer laboratory-developed PCR tests for the detection of the monkeypox virus. (Photo by Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
A medical laboratory technician picks up from a fridge a reactive to test suspected monkeypox samples at the microbiology laboratory of La Paz Hospital on June 06, 2022 in Madrid, Spain. Europe has been at the center of the monkeypox virus outbreak. (Photo by Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)
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