President Biden is naming top officials from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the CDC, Centers for Disease Control, to coordinate the White House response to monkeypox here in the United States, where the virus has been reported in 47 states and Washington, D.C. New York City has now been declared monkeypox — or, has declared monkeypox a public health emergency. Officials described the city as the “epicenter” of the outbreak, with tens of thousands of people vulnerable to exposure. California and Illinois also issued a state of emergency over the rapid spread of monkeypox. Worldwide, over 23,000 infections have been detected in at least 80 countries, with the U.S. leading confirmed cases, though health experts believe many more monkeypox cases have gone undiagnosed due to shortages of testing. This week, the first monkeypox deaths outside of Africa were reported in Spain, Brazil and India.
I wrote that piece — I started writing it in the end of May. And like many people I’m in conversation with, we were extremely concerned about the way that monkeypox was moving around the world and how we were starting to see cases in the United States. And so, at the time, I was making the case to the Biden administration, to the national government, that we really needed to proactively go ahead and start vaccinating men who have sex with men, particularly considering that we were coming into Pride Month. There were multiple opportunities all through June, beginning where I live normally, in Chicago, with the International Mr. Leather festival, and there were going to be Pride events all through the
— source democracynow.org | Aug 02, 2022
#classwar