#Official #monkeypox #cases #exceed #model #predicts #million #cases #worldwide #fall
The unprecedented global outbreak of monkeypox is worsening around the world, raising fears among scientists and clinicians around the world that another pandemic00 is developing alongside the COVID-19 pandemic.
A record 781 new cases were identified worldwide on July 1, more than half of them in Spain, bringing the seven-day moving average to 402 daily cases, ten times more than in May. Over the last four weeks, the number of infections worldwide has increased more than sixfold to a total of 6,229 cases, including 6,178 confirmed cases and 51 suspected cases. There are now 459 official infections in the United States, almost 20 times more than in the last four weeks.
Loading tweet…
The global epidemic spread rapidly to 67 non-endemic countries and territories in all regions of the world. Spain, England, and Germany each surpassed 1,000 confirmed cases, while the United States has 459. Given the Biden administration’s slow response to the current crisis, public health advocates and infectious disease experts believe the United States will soon catch up with their European counterparts.
As of Sunday night, 32 states and the District of Columbia had reported monkeypox cases since the first case was identified six weeks ago. The states leading in the number of confirmed infections are California (95), New York (90), Illinois (53), and Florida (50), given their immediate links to international travel and population density. Public health authorities have said the official numbers are likely underestimates, as medical professionals miss cases due to a lack of widespread testing and ignorance of the signs and symptoms of the disease.
Over the weekend, a TikTok video went viral in which a young woman named Halle shared her experience trying to get tested for monkeypox, revealing just how completely unprepared the US healthcare system is for this. growing epidemic.
Loading tweet…
After contacting two urgent care centers and two primary care doctors who were unaware of the monkeypox outbreak, or even the disease itself, they told him to go back to work and prescribed antibiotics. A dermatologist he was scheduled to see canceled his appointment and told him to contact the CDC.
Halle commented: “I called the CDC. The CDC says: ‘Call your PCP [fournisseur de soins primaires]’. The lady I spoke to at the CDC had no idea what she was talking about and she was unable to answer any of my questions. I couldn’t get tested anywhere. The doctors refused to see me, and I have this mysterious, painful rash all over my face, chest, arms, and back… The CDC has no idea what they’re doing, no one is educated, not even the doctors, and the doctors refuse to see him, treat him or examine him. And the CDC is doing nothing about it.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, recently commented on the monkeypox outbreak with his usual complacent attitude, saying, “As a global community, we’ve known this for decades. We know how it spreads. We have tests that can identify infected people. We have vaccines that are very effective against it.”
Jha’s first statement about monkeypox is as bogus and empty as his hackneyed refrain about the COVID-19 pandemic: “We have the tools.” In reality, if the “tools” exist, they are not implemented and managed in a coordinated way due to the decades-long dismantling of public health, a dismantling that has been highlighted and exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
James Krellenstein, co-founder of the HIV treatment advocacy group Prep4All, gave Dr. Jha’s reverse assessment to The hill, stating bluntly: “We have been screaming for a month about how dire the monkeypox diagnosis situation is. And it was really a clear and avoidable mistake, and it’s very clear that this administration has not learned the lessons from COVID.”
David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of HTA Directors, said The hill“Where we have fallen behind is in the rationalization of tests, the availability of vaccines, the rationalization of access to the best therapies. These three areas have been bureaucratic and slow, and that means we have not been able to contain this outbreak.”
These comments only get to the heart of the matter. The entire public health infrastructure is underfunded and in disarray, meaning the mistakes made earlier will continue unless serious steps are taken to put the building back together. The inability to fund one of the most important social functions of government while making all resources available for permanent warfare is not simply an error of omission or fault: it is a deliberate, bipartisan political decision made on behalf of the corporate oligarchy and financial.
Globally, the World Health Organization’s IHR Emergency Committee met on June 23 and refrained from officially declaring the global smallpox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). English), choosing to wait an unspecified period until more data accumulates.
The move is comparable to the WHO’s belated response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was only declared PHEIC on January 30, 2020, when there were already 7,818 confirmed cases in 19 countries around the world. It was not until March 11, 2020 that the WHO officially declared the coronavirus a pandemic. As the WHO continues to stall, model estimates predict dire consequences, and the number of cases continues to rise exponentially.
The results of a recent modeling study published June 21, 2022 in The Conversation by Adam Kleczkowski, professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Strathclyde, offered four scenarios for how the UK monkeypox epidemic might play out. . The second scenario, in which UK monkeypox virus infections could reach up to 60,000 cases per day by the end of the year, seems the most plausible given the current exponential trajectory.
As Kleczkowski points out, “the size of the outbreak is already much larger than the largest outbreak of 2017-19 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (760). Large gatherings, including raves and festivals, may have created new streaming communities.”
This is consistent with projections by data scientist J. Weiland that without any mitigation measures, the total number of monkeypox cases worldwide could reach 100,000 in August and 1 million by the end of September.
Loading tweet…
As the global monkeypox epidemic continues its onslaught everywhere, the demand for resources may soon outstrip the available supply of vaccines and treatments. Bavarian Nordic, a small Danish company, is the manufacturer of Jynneos, the only developed vaccine against the monkeypox virus.
On Friday, the company announced that the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) had ordered an additional 2.5 million doses of frozen liquid Jynneos. With prior orders from BARDA, a total of 4.4 million doses will be delivered to the United States in 2022 and 2023. Current inventory is approximately 56,000 doses, with another 300,000 expected in the coming weeks.
However, Bavarian Nordic’s monkeypox vaccine manufacturing capacity has been reduced due to the partial closure and planned expansion of its facilities since last August. Therefore, the rest of the world will have to fight to get the limited doses of vaccines (enough for 2.5 million people) that it has.
According to New York Times, the vaccine production plant is not expected to reopen until late summer at the earliest, and additional vaccines will not be available for at least six months. This means the company could only produce, at most, fewer than five million doses of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine for the rest of the world through 2022.
Professor Angela Rasmussen, a researcher at the Organization for Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said the current supply of monkeypox vaccines is “certainly not sufficient to vaccinate everyone at risk”.
In Europe, Spain was the first to launch the vaccination of high-risk people. Last week, the country received 5,300 doses from the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), of the 109,090 doses purchased from Bavarian Nordic.
The vaccines will be administered through a ring vaccination program targeting close contacts of people who may contract the virus, including healthcare workers. The European Medicines Agency is also considering using the smallpox vaccine Imvanex, which provides almost 85% protection against monkeypox. However, the safety profile of previous generation smallpox vaccines may have significant consequences for some people, including heart damage.
Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the public health agency had activated its emergency operations center to “respond to the ever-evolving challenges of the outbreak.” New York City and Washington DC have offered a limited number of vaccines to residents who meet high-risk criteria, such as men who have sex with men, sex workers, or employees of a facility where sexual activity takes place. However, if the current epidemic is spreading mainly in this category of the population, the whole society is vulnerable to infection and it is only a matter of time before it starts spreading in all populations.
(Article published in English on July 4, 2022)