https://mailchi.mp/11f2d4aad100/the-weekly-gist-august-12-2022?e=d1e747d2d8

This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a change intended to stretch out the limited supply of monkeypox vaccine doses, allowing the shots to reach five times the number of patients. Monkeypox, a disease in the smallpox family, is spread primarily through skin-to-skin contact, often causing patients to develop painful lesions.

Although most cases resolve within a few weeks, the rapid growth in cases, now more than 9K domestically and 30K globally, is still a cause for concern, leading federal officials to declare a public health emergency last week. The FDA is also recommending that providers administer the vaccine between layers of skin, rather than below the skin into fatty tissue. This dosing change will allow providers to extend the nearly half a million doses not yet sent to states, in order to reach the more than 1.6M Americans considered highest risk.

The Gist: The country is now dealing with two public health emergencies from highly contagious diseases simultaneously. While monkeypox isn’t nearly as transmissible, deadly, or overwhelming to the healthcare system as COVID, the public health response has nonetheless been lackluster (and this week’s new COVID guidance suggests that the CDC has largely given up on managing the response, devolving responsibility to individuals in nearly all settings). 

For those hoping that the COVID experience would spark faster action by our public health system, the federal response to monkeypox shows we haven’t applied the lessons learned. Public health authorities aren’t conducting rigorous disease surveillance, testing and treatments remain hard to get, and Congress isn’t dedicating funds for the response. The lack of proactive leadership is likely to result in healthcare providers again bearing the brunt of efforts to manage another unsuppressed viral outbreak.