Marinscope
Monkeypox is popping up more and more on the radar screens of health officials. In Marin, two cases (and a suspected third) have been reported and more than 2,000 cases nationwide have been reported since May. The county’s health guru, Dr. Matt Willis, told Marin political leaders that eventually the virus will become a pandemic.
To make matters more alarming, The nation is short of monkeypox vaccine. Willis told Marin County supervisors that the county has only 150 doses, “which is not nearly enough.”
While monkeypox is now mainly spread through the LGBTQ community, doctors say it is only a matter of time that it makes the leap to the general population. On a related front, New York City has asked the World Health Organization to rename the monkeypox virus to avoid stigmatizing patients.
“We have a growing concern for the potentially devastating and stigmatizing effects that the messaging around the ‘monkeypox’ virus can have on… already vulnerable communities,” New York City public health commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a letter to WHO.
Marin has asked the state for more vaccines and the state has asked the federal government for more vaccines. The LGBTQ community has been highly critical of the Biden Administration for failing to have enough vaccines to cope with the growing spread in the United States.
Ariel Friedlander told BuzzFeed News that the lack of federal response scared her.
“We’ve already bought vaccines with our tax dollars,” she said. “How are we not outraged that these vaccines are getting into bodies? I’m frustrated at the lack of communication and federal response to do something. I barely hear any government official talking about it to the media.”
In San Francisco leaders and LGBTQ gathered in front of the US Health and Human Services’ regional office to protest the sluggish response to the monkeypox outbreak by the Biden Administration.
“There’s a lot of anger and it’s totally justified,” said state senator Scott Wiener, who joined protesters from the Alice B Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club, San Francisco Aids Foundation and Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and other groups demanding increased access to monkeypox vaccines, testing and therapeutics for an outbreak that so far has been disproportionately affecting gay and bisexual men.
Wiener said the gay community is “once again wondering why their community is being failed by the federal government.”.
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