Biden: Checking monkeypox options

President Joe Biden said Sunday that the United States is looking into what vaccines might be available to protect people against monkeypox, saying that “everybody” should be concerned as cases continue to spread around the world and some countries beef up their treatment stockpiles.

“We’re working on it hard to figure out what we do and what vaccine, if any, might be available for it,” Biden said. He said the recent spread of monkeypox infections — identified by the World Health Organization in at least 12 countries where the relatively rare disease is not endemic — could be “consequential” if it continues.

Health advisers “haven’t told me the level of exposure yet, but it is something that everybody should be concerned about,” Biden said. “It is a concern in that if it were to spread it would be consequential.”

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the United States has vaccines available to treat a potential monkeypox outbreak and that Biden has been briefed on the case tracks domestically and abroad. “He’s being apprised of this on a very regular basis,” Sullivan said Sunday.

Scientists are rushing to figure out what is causing the infections and how to respond. The WHO has received reports of 92 cases confirmed in a lab and 28 suspected cases under investigation in the United States, Canada, Australia and nine countries in Europe.

Studies suggest the smallpox vaccine is at least 85% effective against monkeypox, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which notes that the United States has licensed two vaccines to prevent smallpox, with one being authorized specifically for monkeypox.

The as-yet unexplained spread of a contagious virus has set off alarm bells in a scientific community still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic — but some experts take care to note that the two are different. Monkeypox transmits less easily between humans, and there are vaccine options that have been shown to be effective against the disease.

“This is not a new virus to us. We’ve known about this virus for decades,” Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

“This is a virus we understand. We have vaccines against it. We have treatments against it. … It’s not as contagious as covid. So I am confident we’re going be able to keep our arms around it.”

At this point, the general risk to the public from monkeypox is considered “very, very low,” Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, previously told reporters.

One monkeypox infection was identified in Massachusetts, and New York City health officials said Friday that two patients were tested as part of an investigation into suspected cases of monkeypox in the state. One patient tested positive for orthopoxvirus, the family of viruses to which monkeypox belongs, “and had an illness consistent with monkeypox,” state authorities said.

Jha said he would not be surprised to see a few more cases in the coming days. On Wednesday, Bavarian Nordic, the Copenhagen-based company that developed the smallpox vaccine licensed for use against monkeypox in the United States, said the U.S. government had exercised its options under an agreement with the company to “supply a freeze-dried version of JYNNEOS® smallpox vaccine, thus allowing for the first doses of this version to be manufactured and invoiced in 2023 and 2024.”

Information for this article was contributed by Annabelle Timsit, Seung Min Kim, Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Knowles, Timothy Bella, Lindsey Bever and Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Washington Post and staff members of The Associated Press.