The Biden administration is letting pointless red tape block delivery of 1 million monkeypox vaccine doses — which are currently stuck at the manufacturing plant in Denmark. Meanwhile, monkeypox is spreading rapidly. That’s discussed in a New York Post article, about how a Biden administration “snafu leaves 1 million monkeypox doses in Denmark.”
It describes how anti-monkeypox activists sent a “June 28 letter to the White House revealing the existence of massive supply sidelined by red tape.”
The U.S. government has spent more than $2 billion developing and manufacturing the vaccine for our national stockpile, the June 28 letter states, but the Food and Drug Administration won’t import the doses because it failed to inspect the plant — and then refused to accept inspection results from European regulators, who determined that the plant is safe. The FDA “by policy” will not accept EU sign-off for “any vaccine,” according to Dr. Raj Panjabi, Biden’s special assistant leading pandemic preparedness. As the New York Post observes,
Panjabi’s answer did not dispute key contentions in the letter about the number of shots, the FDA’s failure to inspect as required or that the FDA currently accepts EU certifications for other products and is already considering expanding the policy to cover vaccines.
And the response infuriated one of the authors of the letter, James Krellenstein, who called the White House honcho’s statements were “bulls–t.”
“That’s bullshit and they’re covering up,” retorted Krellenstein, a longtime activist who co-founded a group, PrEP4All, which successfully pushed officials to expand access to medications that prevent HIV. “They’re not being transparent about what’s going on.
“Why were the Europeans able to inspect this plant a year ago, ensuring these doses can be used in Europe and the Biden Administration didn’t do the same,” he added. “The FDA is making a judgment that they’d rather let gay people remain unvaccinated for weeks and weeks and weeks than trust the European certification process.”… New York City has received just 7,000 doses from the federal government amid the national vaccine shortage. Meanwhile, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s appointment booking system has failed to keep up with the high demand for the shots — most recently on Wednesday.
The Biden administration is allowing monkeypox to get permanently entrenched in America. “The U.S. may be losing the fight against monkeypox, scientists say…weaknesses in the public health system are giving the virus a chance to become entrenched,” reports the New York Times:
As epidemics go, the monkeypox outbreak should have been relatively easy to snuff out. The virus does not spread efficiently except through intimate contact, and tests and vaccines were at hand even before the current outbreak.
Yet the response in the United States has been sluggish and timid, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid pandemic, experts say, raising troubling questions about the nation’s preparedness for pandemic threats.
The Biden administration bungled its response to the monkeypox epidemic, and has not distributed enough vaccines to high-risk people to prevent its further spread. People weren’t tested for the disease, when they clearly needed to be tested. As a result, monkeypox is spreading undetected.
The Washington Post earlier reported that “public health experts, including within the Biden administration, are increasingly concerned that the federal government’s handling of the largest-ever U.S. monkeypox outbreak is mirroring its slow and inept response to the coronavirus pandemic 2½ years ago, with potentially dire consequences. As a result, they said, community transmission is occurring largely undetected, and the critical window in which to control the outbreak is closing quickly.”
The Biden administration does not seem interested in speedy action, judging by its elimination of Operation Warp Speed. That was the Trump-era project that got several coronavirus vaccines approved quickly, in months, rather than the years it usually takes to approve a vaccine. Soon after Biden took office, his administration ended Operation Warp Speed, and forced out its architect, a leading vaccine researcher and expert. The demise of Operation Warp Speed means that it will be harder to develop and approve vaccines for new variants and mutations of monkeypox.
As The Washington Post noted, “Public health experts also have criticized U.S. officials for not proactively vaccinating high-risk individuals against the virus, even as other nations have moved more aggressively to do so. Public health experts and activists” had clamored “for more-proactive vaccinations in high-risk communities, warning that the outbreak could be amplified as the gay community celebrates Pride Month.” One gay man described how he had “four close contacts” that he would have avoided if only he had been tested for monkeypox.
