The federal government faces mounting criticism over its management of the monkeypox outbreak after the White House declared a public health emergency.
The healthcare worker is going to give a vaccine.
The emergency was declared by the Health and Human Services Secretary during a press conference.
The declaration will allow the federal government to receive outbreak data more quickly from states and will help the U.S. deploy more healthcare workers to fight the virus, according to officials.
It can help federal agencies allocate more money to vaccine and drug development.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, HHS has been working with Bavarian Nordic to speed up the availability of vaccines, and is considering a strategy called "dose-sparing" to allow healthcare providers to extract five separate vaccine doses from a one-dose vial.
The declaration comes after several cities and states like New York and California had moved on their own to designate the virus, which has disproportionately affected men who have sex with men, and in particular those with multiple partners, as an emergency.
6,617 is the total number of people. The number of confirmed cases of monkeypox and orthopoxviruses was reported by the CDC as of Wednesday. There are no cases in Montana or Wyoming.
Two weeks ago, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a public health emergency due to a rapid increase in cases. In parts of Africa where monkeypox is endemic, there have been several deaths from the disease this year, though there have typically been little international attention. More than 600,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine have been distributed by the White House. According to multiple outlets, the U.S. has begun to make 1.1 million shots of the two-shot Jynneos vaccine, still less than a third of the vaccines needed for people at highest risk of contracting the virus. Major cities in the U.S., including New York City and San Francisco, have been scrambling to get enough doses to vaccine at-risk populations, in some cases delaying the second shot of the two-dose regimen to make sure more people can receive the first dose of the vaccine.
Critics have criticized the federal government's approach to ordering and distributing vaccines. The U.S. invested more than $1 billion in the development of the Jynneos shots and relied on a small Danish company. The Times reported that the HHS allowed Bavarian Nordic to give 215,000 vaccine doses to European countries instead of keeping them for the US. The U.S. had 20 million doses of Jynneos, but failed to refill most of them as they expired.
Many of the 6.9 million Jynneos vaccine doses ordered by the U.S. will not arrive until next year. In September the U.S. will get another 150,000 doses from the Strategic National Stockpile. After that, the next shipments of vaccines are not expected to arrive until October because the administration waited too long to ask for hundreds of thousands of doses to be bottled.
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