Mary Wilson
Well-known member
July 25, 2022
By Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Otterman
On the Thursday before Pride Weekend last month, hundreds of men dropped what they were doing and raced to a city-run health clinic in Manhattan. Finally, more than a month after monkeypox appeared in New York City, a vaccine was being made available to sexually active gay and bisexual men, among whom the virus was rapidly spreading.
But there was a catch: There were only 1,000 doses available. Within two hours, the only clinic offering the shots began turning people away.
At that same moment, some 300,000 doses of a ready-to-use vaccine owned by the United States sat in a facility in Denmark. American officials had waited weeks as the virus spread in New York and beyond before deciding to ship those doses to the United States.
Even then, there was little apparent urgency: The doses were flown piecemeal, arriving in shipments spread out over more than a week. Many didn’t arrive until July, more than six weeks after the first case was identified in New York City.
By holding back the doses, an early opportunity to contain or slow the largest monkeypox outbreak in the country appears to have slipped by.
... The United States also owned well over a million Jynneos doses in vials — and enough vaccine for millions of more doses that had yet to be filled into vials — in Denmark, where the producer of the vaccine, Bavarian Nordic, is headquartered.
Much of that supply was tied up in bureaucratic red tape because the Food and Drug Administration had yet to inspect and certify a new facility outside Copenhagen where the company now fills the vaccine into vials — an issue that has yet to be fully resolved.
But there were 372,000 doses owned by the United States that were ready to go. These doses, stored at the company’s headquarters, had been filled into vials earlier, at a different facility with the necessary F.D.A. approval.
Rather than quickly transfer those doses back to the United States and begin administering them, however, the federal government adopted a wait-and-see attitude. In the first few weeks after monkeypox was detected in the United States, the government requested only 72,000 of the 372,000 doses.
... One reason that federal officials were reluctant to order all available doses early on involved cold storage and shelf life. The storage facilities in America where the doses would be kept weren’t as cold as the Denmark facility, said Dr. Disbrow, a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services who runs BARDA.
“So if all the doses were not necessary for the outbreak,” he said, “their shelf life would be dramatically shortened.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/nyregion/nyc-monkeypox-vaccine-doses-denmark.html
By Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Otterman
On the Thursday before Pride Weekend last month, hundreds of men dropped what they were doing and raced to a city-run health clinic in Manhattan. Finally, more than a month after monkeypox appeared in New York City, a vaccine was being made available to sexually active gay and bisexual men, among whom the virus was rapidly spreading.
But there was a catch: There were only 1,000 doses available. Within two hours, the only clinic offering the shots began turning people away.
At that same moment, some 300,000 doses of a ready-to-use vaccine owned by the United States sat in a facility in Denmark. American officials had waited weeks as the virus spread in New York and beyond before deciding to ship those doses to the United States.
Even then, there was little apparent urgency: The doses were flown piecemeal, arriving in shipments spread out over more than a week. Many didn’t arrive until July, more than six weeks after the first case was identified in New York City.
By holding back the doses, an early opportunity to contain or slow the largest monkeypox outbreak in the country appears to have slipped by.
... The United States also owned well over a million Jynneos doses in vials — and enough vaccine for millions of more doses that had yet to be filled into vials — in Denmark, where the producer of the vaccine, Bavarian Nordic, is headquartered.
Much of that supply was tied up in bureaucratic red tape because the Food and Drug Administration had yet to inspect and certify a new facility outside Copenhagen where the company now fills the vaccine into vials — an issue that has yet to be fully resolved.
But there were 372,000 doses owned by the United States that were ready to go. These doses, stored at the company’s headquarters, had been filled into vials earlier, at a different facility with the necessary F.D.A. approval.
Rather than quickly transfer those doses back to the United States and begin administering them, however, the federal government adopted a wait-and-see attitude. In the first few weeks after monkeypox was detected in the United States, the government requested only 72,000 of the 372,000 doses.
... One reason that federal officials were reluctant to order all available doses early on involved cold storage and shelf life. The storage facilities in America where the doses would be kept weren’t as cold as the Denmark facility, said Dr. Disbrow, a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services who runs BARDA.
“So if all the doses were not necessary for the outbreak,” he said, “their shelf life would be dramatically shortened.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/nyregion/nyc-monkeypox-vaccine-doses-denmark.html