Monkeypox tests and vaccines are in short supply as public health officials grapple with red tape and short supplies. Yet some of the processes put in place in response to COVID-19 have helped.
for monkeypox resources, and the California Department of Public Health sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requesting 600,000 to 800,000 vaccines — that’s more than half of the total available doses for the entire country.used for monkeypox, with an additional 43,000 sent straight to Los Angeles County. Those doses represent “a drop in the bucket” of what’s needed, state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan told county health officers in a meeting last week.
Madera County has not reported any monkeypox cases, but neighboring Fresno County has seven cases. Bosse said her department is already in talks with the state on how to redirect COVID-19 contact tracers to monkeypox response and how to scale up vaccination clinics. “What’s frustrating is that unlike COVID, which was a brand new virus that we had never seen before…with monkeypox we do know about it. It’s been around almost 70 years,” Wiener said. “We actually have a vaccine and an effective treatment. You would think that would be a recipe for very quickly controlling an outbreak.”
“We have a specific budget for tobacco prevention, a specific budget for obesity prevention,” Madera’s public health director Bosse said. “We have 78 for one department that all have to be tracked separately.”in the past two years. Some counties have money left over or have staff hired to run COVID-19 clinics and conduct contact tracing, but haven’t been able to use them for monkeypox, which Elliott says they’ll need as cases increase in Tulare County.
The earlier a case is diagnosed, the easier it is to conduct contact tracing, which becomes critical in the face of vaccine shortages. That, however, continues to be an obstacle.Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, infectious disease specialist at UC San Franciscothat San Francisco’s health department has largely abandoned contact tracing as a primary containment strategy — citing difficulties in getting patients to divulge sexual partners — and is instead telling people to “self-refer partners.
“We have two cases but we’d be ignorant to think we won’t have more,” she said. “Eventually, we won’t have the bandwidth for this anymore.”