Editorial: Biden missed chance to tame monkeypox

The Biden administration on Thursday officially declared monkeypox a public health emergency.

Did it have to come to this?

The first case to hit the U.S. showed up in Boston on May 19. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 6,617 cases across the country. There are three known cases in Marin and nearly 400 in San Francisco County.

That exponential spike is why President Joe Biden and Co. are being slammed for failing to grasp the severity of the outbreak. There are shortages of vaccine doses and tests, while demand is climbing.

Some public health experts worry that we’ve already lost the chance to contain and even eliminate monkeypox here.

David C. Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, told CNN that the outbreak is “out of control,” adding that it’s something many public health leaders warned would happen if the federal government didn’t act with urgency.

It didn’t, and here we are — from 1 to 6,617 cases in a little under two and a half months.

If there’s one thing the COVID-19 pandemic should have taught us, is that the world is small when it comes to spreading viruses. Easy international travel helps an outbreak in one country become emergencies in many others. The first U.S. monkeypox case was detected in a man who had reportedly traveled to Canada recently.

Dr. David Heymann, former head of the World Health Organization’s emergencies department, told The Associated Press in May that the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries was “a random event” that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.

Monkeypox cases are nearly all among men who have sex with men.

The lack of early action is familiar to the LGBTQ community.

“Program after program talked about the fear and stigma that gay men are experiencing in relation to (monkeypox), the shortages of vaccine, the burned-out staff, the shortages of funding to cover what has been an unanticipated public health emergency,” said Harvey. Managing monkeypox is similar to the earliest days of HIV and COVID-19, he said.

Unlike AIDS, which took years, if not decades, to manage with antiretroviral drugs, and COVID, tamed with vaccines developed at lightning speed, the vaccines for monkeypox already exist.

So how did the government miss the ball?

According to the New York Times, the monkeypox vaccine shortage 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.

That’s bureaucratic bungling at its best.

Declaring a public health emergency won’t help with the vaccine shortages,  but it could speed up the approval process for new treatments and give more flexibility for federal agencies to respond to the outbreak.

Many days late, many dollars short.

Hopefully, officials are paying attention this time, and learning what not to do should other fast-spreading viruses become issues in the future.

We can’t go through this again.

Written by the Boston Herald editorial board.