Pirate's Cove

There are probably easier things to do which require less vaccine

Gillibrand calls on Biden to invoke Production Act, increase monkeypox vaccines

Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Wednesday called on the Biden administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to help increase supply and access to monkeypox vaccines, which lag far behind demand as the virus continues to spread nationwide.

“Right now there are enough vaccines in the United States to cover one-third of the community generally currently most at risk,” Gillibrand said during a press conference. The senator’s own state of New York is the hardest hit in the country and has declared a disaster emergency.

Which community is that, Senator? Neither you nor the article say

Gillibrand’s calls for DPA action come after The Washington Post recently reported that the U.S. won’t be receiving any more doses of the monkeypox vaccine Jynneos until October.

When pressed on specifics of what the DPA could do to increase supply quickly, Gillibrand pointed to prioritizing government orders of monkeypox vaccines ahead of other orders.

“We know exactly which manufacturers already manufacture those vaccines, and so we can enter a contract with them immediately,” she said.

Perhaps she could ask Biden why his HHS failed

U.S. Could Have Had Many More Doses of Monkeypox Vaccine This Year

The shortage of vaccines to combat a fast-growing monkeypox outbreak was caused in part because the Department of Health and Human Services failed early on to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution, according to multiple administration officials familiar with the matter.

By the time the federal government placed its orders, the vaccine’s Denmark-based manufacturer, Bavarian Nordic, had booked other clients and was unable to do the work for months, officials said — even though the federal government had invested well over $1 billion in the vaccine’s development.

So, Biden, who’s barely mentioned in the NY Times article, is upset

Two senior federal officials, who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly, said Mr. Biden is upset by the vaccine shortage. His administration has often touted its success delivering hundreds of millions of coronavirus shots to Americans, and is stung by criticism that a lack of foresight and management has left gay men — the prime risk group for monkeypox — unprotected.

Now, if Trump was in office, the whole piece would be one long blamestorm, mentioning that the buck stops here. That paragraph is deep into the piece, and followed by

So far, according to the C.D.C., 6,326 cases of monkeypox have been reported. For now, the virus is spreading almost entirely among gay and bisexual men, and those with multiple or anonymous partners are considered especially at risk. Mr. Becerra noted that while more than a million Americans have died of Covid-19, no one in the United States has died of monkeypox.

Yeah, so, men involved in gay say, often with multiple or anonymous partners. Gillibrand, along with a lot of agencies and governors, should be telling them to stop doing that for a bit. Perhaps the governors of California and New York, who have declared emergencies, can lock down the bathhouses and other places this behavior is occurring. Restrict the skeezy public parties, like keep happening in the streets of San Francisco. Funny that the government is unwilling to lock down or restrict on this, right?

After repeating early COVID mistakes, US now has the world’s biggest monkeypox outbreak

The story of monkeypox feels to experts frustratingly like a replay of the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Testing took too long to get launched. Data hasn’t revealed the full extent of the outbreak. The spread wasn’t stopped quickly enough.

Monkeypox was supposed to be different, because it is much harder to transmit, treatments and vaccines were already available, much was known about a virus first described in 1958 and so many lessons were supposedly learned from COVID-19.

Yet the United States now has the world’s biggest outbreak of monkeypox with more than 6,600 Americans diagnosed since mid-May. Rarely seen outside of Africa before the spring, the virus, a less deadly cousin of smallpox, has now triggered a 26,000-person global emergency, reaching 83 countries, 76 of which had not historically seen the disease.

No, it’s not like COVID. We know how it’s being spread and the majority of whom is getting it. If anything, it’s like Democratic Party governors sticking old people in nursing homes where COVID could spread and kill them (yet, no one has been tried in a criminal court for this): we all knew this would be bad. Gay many having gay sex at parties is a great way to spread it. Not sure why any would continue for the moment.

“If we don’t react more aggressively within the next couple of months – it’ll never be the same as coronavirus, but it could mimic the (spread of the) AIDS epidemic pretty closely,” said Jared Auclair, an analytical chemist and associate dean at Northeastern University in Boston.

And the news and government were afraid to say “hey, gay men, this is mostly involving you. So, don’t engage in risky sex.”

Read: Gillibrand Wants Biden To Invoke Production Act For Monkeypox Vaccine »