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Washington Post Article: (Cut into several posts because it is way over the max char limit for posting!)
Inside America’s monkeypox crisis — and the mistakes that made it worse
By Dan Diamond, Fenit Nirappil and Lena H. Sun
Updated August 17, 2022 at 10:30 a.m. EDT|Published August 17, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The nation’s top health officials believed they had finally hit upon a solution to quell weeks of public criticism about the straggling government response to the monkeypox outbreak spreading across the country this summer.
They would stretch the nation’s limited supply of the only FDA-approved vaccine for monkeypox by splitting doses to cover five times as many people — an admission, after repeated reassurances by top government officials, that the United States did not have enough shots for every at-risk American, after all.
But after Health and Human Services officials announced their proposal on Aug. 4, Paul Chaplin, chief executive of Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, called a senior U.S. health official and accused the Biden administration of breaching its contracts with his company by planning to use the doses in an unapproved manner. Even worse, said two people with knowledge of the episode, Chaplin threatened to cancel all future vaccine orders from the United States, throwing into doubt the administration’s entire monkeypox strategy.
“People are begging for monkeypox vaccines, and we’ve just pissed off the one manufacturer,” said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The behind-the-scenes clash with Bavarian Nordic, which has not previously been reported, was just the latest episode in a monkeypox response beset by turf wars, ongoing surprises and muddled messaging, with key partners frequently finding themselves out of sync as they race to catch up to a rapidly unfolding crisis.
For two months, the Biden administration has been chased by headlines about its failure to order enough vaccines, speed treatments and make tests available to head off an outbreak that has grown from one case in Massachusetts on May 17 to more than 12,600 this week, overwhelmingly among gay and bisexual men. And 100 days after the outbreak was first detected in Europe, no country has more cases than the United States — with public health experts warning the virus is on the verge of becoming permanently entrenched here.
“I think there’s a potential to get this back in the box, but it’s going to be very difficult at this point,” Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration under Donald Trump and has advised the Biden administration on its response to public health outbreaks, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last week.
Interviews with more than 40 officials working on the monkeypox response, outside advisers, public health experts and patients show that despite efforts to learn from the nation’s coronavirus failures, officials struggled to meet growing demand for testing, vaccines and treatments. Early mistakes, including the failure to recognize the virus was spreading differently and far more aggressively than it had previously, and a plodding bureaucracy left hundreds of thousands of gay men facing the threat of an agonizing illness that has not led to U.S. fatalities but can cause painful lesions some have likened to being pierced by shards of glass while going to the bathroom. And experts fear broader circulation of a virus that can infect anyone by close contact.
Biden officials insist the nation’s response is at a turning point, touting a White House monkeypox team set up this month to lead the effort, the recent decision to declare monkeypox a public health emergency and the new vaccine plan to address growing demands for shots.
“The president asked me to come here and do this,” said Bob Fenton, the freshly installed national monkeypox coordinator, adding that his goal is to “control, contain, eliminate monkeypox here in the United States and to do that in accelerated fashion.”
The coming weeks will reveal whether the administration has overcome its early struggles — or whether too much time was lost as the virus took hold in the United States under a president who had vowed to prevent pandemics.
Inside America’s monkeypox crisis — and the mistakes that made it worse
By Dan Diamond, Fenit Nirappil and Lena H. Sun
Updated August 17, 2022 at 10:30 a.m. EDT|Published August 17, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The nation’s top health officials believed they had finally hit upon a solution to quell weeks of public criticism about the straggling government response to the monkeypox outbreak spreading across the country this summer.
They would stretch the nation’s limited supply of the only FDA-approved vaccine for monkeypox by splitting doses to cover five times as many people — an admission, after repeated reassurances by top government officials, that the United States did not have enough shots for every at-risk American, after all.
But after Health and Human Services officials announced their proposal on Aug. 4, Paul Chaplin, chief executive of Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, called a senior U.S. health official and accused the Biden administration of breaching its contracts with his company by planning to use the doses in an unapproved manner. Even worse, said two people with knowledge of the episode, Chaplin threatened to cancel all future vaccine orders from the United States, throwing into doubt the administration’s entire monkeypox strategy.
“People are begging for monkeypox vaccines, and we’ve just pissed off the one manufacturer,” said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The behind-the-scenes clash with Bavarian Nordic, which has not previously been reported, was just the latest episode in a monkeypox response beset by turf wars, ongoing surprises and muddled messaging, with key partners frequently finding themselves out of sync as they race to catch up to a rapidly unfolding crisis.
For two months, the Biden administration has been chased by headlines about its failure to order enough vaccines, speed treatments and make tests available to head off an outbreak that has grown from one case in Massachusetts on May 17 to more than 12,600 this week, overwhelmingly among gay and bisexual men. And 100 days after the outbreak was first detected in Europe, no country has more cases than the United States — with public health experts warning the virus is on the verge of becoming permanently entrenched here.
“I think there’s a potential to get this back in the box, but it’s going to be very difficult at this point,” Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration under Donald Trump and has advised the Biden administration on its response to public health outbreaks, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last week.
Interviews with more than 40 officials working on the monkeypox response, outside advisers, public health experts and patients show that despite efforts to learn from the nation’s coronavirus failures, officials struggled to meet growing demand for testing, vaccines and treatments. Early mistakes, including the failure to recognize the virus was spreading differently and far more aggressively than it had previously, and a plodding bureaucracy left hundreds of thousands of gay men facing the threat of an agonizing illness that has not led to U.S. fatalities but can cause painful lesions some have likened to being pierced by shards of glass while going to the bathroom. And experts fear broader circulation of a virus that can infect anyone by close contact.
Biden officials insist the nation’s response is at a turning point, touting a White House monkeypox team set up this month to lead the effort, the recent decision to declare monkeypox a public health emergency and the new vaccine plan to address growing demands for shots.
“The president asked me to come here and do this,” said Bob Fenton, the freshly installed national monkeypox coordinator, adding that his goal is to “control, contain, eliminate monkeypox here in the United States and to do that in accelerated fashion.”
The coming weeks will reveal whether the administration has overcome its early struggles — or whether too much time was lost as the virus took hold in the United States under a president who had vowed to prevent pandemics.