Biden Administration to Distribute Tens of Thousands of Monkeypox Vaccines

The Biden administration is planning to give between 25,000 and 30,000 courses of the Jynneos vaccine—the only one approved by federal regulators—to high-risk states as part of its monkeypox strategy, to be unveiled Tuesday evening, sources told The Washington Post. “Over the next week or so, the plan is to distribute some portion of the existing Jynneos, but not all of it, because they want to save doses for confirmed close contacts,” an official said. The nation’s Strategic National Stockpile was stocked with more than 36,000 courses of Jynneos as of June 14, the Post reported, but the U.S. will obtain 150,000 more for distribution in late July. James Krellenstein, co-founder of PrEP4ALL, has been critical of the slow response as the virus ravages through communities of men who have sex with men. “We have more than a million doses of a vaccine, FDA approved for preventing monkeypox, and the U.S. government cannot figure out how to get it out of freezers in Denmark—doses that it owns—when there’s uncontained spread in the gay community,” Krellenstein told the Post. “If this is a test run for pandemic preparedness, we are flunking.”