Experts describe US response to monkeypox as a ‘failure’

The United States’ response to the budding monkeypox outbreak is being slammed by health experts – blaming officials for being asleep at the wheel and failing to learn lessons from failures early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tropical virus has been detected 866 times in the U.S. according to more recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – but there is near-universal agreement among experts that the figure is a severe undercount.

Monkeypox has been allowed to spread undetected because of failures in America’s testing and surveillance infrastructure – similar to how Covid was allowed to spread so widely early on when it caught the world off guard in early 2020.

Unlike Covid, though, monkeypox is not novel, leaving experts frustrated with how top officials failed to deal with a threat they were already knowledgeable to. 

‘Why is it so hard for something that’s even a known pathogen?’ Dr Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at UCLA said to the New York Times.

‘How many more times do we have to go through this?’ 

America’s monkeypox response has been marred by a fractured and limited testing system and limited access to vaccines that could help Americans get ahead of infection.

At first, when a person was feeling symptoms of the virus they would be tested locally for the orthopox family of viruses.

If positive, their sample would need to be sent to the CDC for confirmation – a process that could take days.

This meant that even working as fast as possible, case figures in the U.S. were always going to be days behind.

Some of those testing gaps have since been filled, with the CDC announcing in recent days that both Labcorp and the Mayo Clinic had been enlisted in expanding testing capacity.

Still, though, access to monkeypox testing is extremely limited and sparse in a nation of over 330 million people.

‘It’s pretty clear that we need to rapidly scale up the ability to diagnose this now,’ said Dr Jay Varma, a Cornell University public health expert who advised the New York City’s mayor’s office during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some experts are comparing this shortage of testing to where America was early on in the Covid pandemic.

One significant difference is that the scientific community had no idea what Covid was when it fist emerged, and how to diagnose it was still unclear.

With a virus like monkeypox, which is endemic in some parts of the world and occasionally pops up in the United States, experts believe the same mistakes should not have been repeated again.

‘We clearly identified this as a major mistake that allowed Covid to get its footprint in the U.S. and spread undetected for a month, without any of us knowing… and now we’re just doing the same thing all over again, because that’s the way it’s done,’ Dr Angela Rasmussen, a public health expert at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan told the Times.

The rolling out of vaccines has been spotty as well. American officials are believed to have around 800,000 doses of the two-shot Jynneos vaccine – a figure that may not be nearly enough.

When vaccines have become available, supply has not been able to meet demand. In New York City – the nation’s virus hotspot – walk-in events to receive the jabs often reach maximum demand within minutes of opening.

These failures to properly track and prevent spread of the virus has many experts fearing that the virus will become endemic in the U.S., as it has in parts of West and Central Africa.