Ring Vaccination Beat Smallpox. Could It Work for Monkeypox?

The person-to- person spread of smallpox made it possible to interrupt the chains of transmission. The easiest way to find the people most at risk of infections is to give them shots. To curb monkeypox, you have to find cases, identify contacts, and have vaccines to give. In the US, none of those efforts are going well, and experts in sexual health are skeptical that ring LGBTQ vaccine will succeed.

The numbers are growing too quickly. An assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health says that if there were five people, they could try to get a vaccine. It doesn't seem like it will happen when you have thousands of cases in the US.

Any attempt to identify people most at risk will have to rely on incomplete information. There are huge gaps in the fence if ring vaccination is seen as a fence around an infection risk.

As far as I can tell, contact tracing has been disorganized and testing was not available until last week. Someone can get a vaccine if they sign up fast. That is not a vaccine. People who might be at risk are offered the doses.

There is lots of blame to go around. The vaccines should be started. There has been a constant presence of monkeypox in Africa for the last 50 years. It's worth having a discussion about whether the international community should have cared about it back then. There are two vaccines that could be used for monkeypox, one of which was used against bioterrorism. There were only two courses of vaccine available in the Strategic National Stockpile when the US government noticed the outbreak. The FDA didn't approve the distribution of another million doses, which were hung up in bottles and ready to ship. Most of the newer vaccine won't arrive until next year after the Department of Health and Human Services placed orders.

The HHS calculated a ratio of cases already detected to the number of people believed to be at highest risk by sending out limited doses. Most of them went to big cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The online sign-up for 9,200 vaccine appointments was done in 7 minutes.