Experts describe US response to monkeypox as ‘failure’

The US response to the emerging monkeypox epidemic has been criticized by health experts, accusing officials of sleeping behind the wheel and failing to learn from failures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tropical virus has been detected 866 times in the United States, according to more recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but there’s an almost universal consensus among experts that the figure is a serious underestimate.

Monkeypox was allowed to spread undetected due to disruptions in America’s testing and surveillance infrastructure, just as it did so early when Covid swept the world in early 2020.

However, unlike Covid, monkeypox is not new and is frustrating experts as to how top officials failed to counter a threat they were already aware of.

“Why is it so hard for something even a known pathogen?” Dr Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at UCLA, told the New York Times.

“How many more times do we have to go through this?”

America’s response to monkeypox has been marred by a broken and limited testing system and limited access to vaccines that can help Americans keep up with the infection.

At first, when a person experienced virus symptoms, orthopox was tested locally for the virus family.

If positive, samples should be sent to the CDC for approval, which can take days.

This meant that even if we worked as quickly as possible, case numbers in the United States would always be days behind.

Some of these testing gaps have since been filled, with the CDC recently announcing that both Labcorp and Mayo Clinic are being called upon to expand testing capacity.

Yet access to monkeypox testing is extremely limited and scarce in a country of more than 330 million people.

Cornell University public health expert Dr. “It’s pretty clear that we need to rapidly increase the ability to diagnose this now,” said Jay Varma.

Some experts compare this lack of testing to where America was at the start of the Covid pandemic.

One key difference was that the scientific community had no idea what Covid was when it first appeared and how to diagnose it.

With a virus like monkeypox, endemic to parts of the world and occasionally seen in the United States, experts believe the same mistakes shouldn’t be repeated.

“We’ve clearly identified this as a serious flaw that allowed Covid to have a footprint in the United States and to spread unnoticed for a month, with none of us knowing how,” he said. Angela Rasmussen, a public health expert at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, told the Times.

The vaccine launch was also unpredictable. US officials are said to have around 800,000 doses of Jynneos vaccine in two injections, which may not be enough.

If vaccines are available, supply cannot meet demand. In New York City, the nation’s virus hotspot, interventionist events to get vaccines often peak in demand within minutes of opening.

These failures to properly detect and prevent the spread of the virus have caused many experts to fear that the virus will become endemic to parts of West and Central Africa, as well as the United States.