The federal government’s response to monkeypox is looking an awful lot like its deeply flawed early response to Covid-19.
In the last few days, Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair, as well as authors at the Washington Post, Axios, and the Wall Street Journal have all published in-depth portraits of the Biden administration and federal health agencies’ response to the monkeypox outbreak, each telling the same bleak story of a sluggish reaction, key missteps, confusion, and miscommunication.
Eban:
As cases of monkeypox ticked upward around the country, spreading primarily via skin-to-skin contact among men who have sex with men, six long weeks passed without significant action to deploy vaccines widely. Vulnerable Americans found themselves hunting for elusive shots and scrambling to add their names to digital sign-up sheets that filled up within minutes of being posted.
Said a former federal health official who worked on the US smallpox response plan, “I can’t see where any part of it was activated.”
. . . to critics, the six-week delay in inspecting the Danish plant is just one in a cascade of unforced errors by the federal government that has allowed the US monkeypox outbreak to spiral out of control.
After Health and Human Services officials announced their proposal on Aug. 4, Paul Chaplin, chief executive of Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, called a senior U.S. health official and accused the Biden administration of breaching its contracts with his company by planning to use the doses in an unapproved manner. Even worse, said two people with knowledge of the episode, Chaplin threatened to cancel all future vaccine orders from the United States, throwing into doubt the administration’s entire monkeypox strategy.
“People are begging for monkeypox vaccines, and we’ve just pissed off the one manufacturer,” said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The Biden administration is facing increasing criticism from frustrated state health officials over a troubled system for distributing monkeypox vaccines that’s slowing their ability to quickly reach patients.
WSJ:
Doctors said they needed to fill out more than 100 pages of paperwork to procure Tpoxx for use beyond smallpox. It took as long as a week to receive shipments. Patients said they had to wait to become sick enough to justify the medication, and then were required to keep a journal recording its use, including photographs documenting the course of their symptoms.
Poor communication, tons of paperwork, slow-moving bureaucracy, confusing and contradictory regulations, mandatory inspections, and glacially paced approval processes delaying the distribution of key vaccines . . . the federal government’s response to monkeypox is looking an awful lot like its early response to Covid-19. Of course, back in 2020, many allegedly bright people chose to believe that the federal government’s slow and stumbling response could be blamed on the one man atop the executive branch, Donald Trump. And no doubt, Trump inflicted plenty of wounds on himself, from being far too credulous about reports out of China to contending that the virus would disappear one day, likely shortly after Election Day.
But here we are, with a new, less-contagious virus and a new president, and we see the same problems.
As Kevin Williamson is fond of saying, “Everything is simple when you don’t know the first thing about it.” Stopping the spread of a highly contagious virus is just about impossible; slowing the spread is challenging in a free society.
Perhaps not knowing the first thing about it is why Joe Biden, who had previously pledged that if he was elected president, his administration would cure cancer, repeatedly promised he would “shut down the virus.” (Biden’s role in his envisioned plan to shut down the virus consisted of him telling other people to shut down the virus.)
Unsurprisingly, even with a vaccine already being rolled out, Biden did not “shut down” the Covid-19 virus, and when confronted with a handful of new cases of monkeypox earlier this year, failed to “shut down” that virus, too. Joe Biden is the kind of guy who just pledges that he has the leadership skills to solve everything, and figures he’ll worry about the details later.
While you can blame Trump for his own rhetoric during the pandemic, the problems in the monkeypox response illuminate deep-rooted longstanding problems in institutions such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the heart of our national problem is the choice to believe, as Biden did, that just having a different president would make the FDA, CDC, and HHS work more effectively. The problem in our government’s response to fast-moving communicable diseases is primarily a bureaucracy problem, not primarily a Donald Trump problem. If you change presidents but keep the institutions the same, you’re going to get largely the same problems.