Just bring us the pictures, Joe!
Top Democrats running to represent the heart of the Big Apple’s LGBTQ community in Congress tore into the Biden administration Friday for allowing red tape to hamper the importation of 1 million doses of a much-needed monkeypox vaccine.
The comments came just hours after The Post highlighted how the Food and Drug Administration’s failure to inspect the Danish plant and its subsequent refusal to accept inspections carried out by European regulators have left staff in limbo.
“It’s now July and this is a vaccine that’s been around and been approved since 2019, which only makes the FDA’s poor planning around vaccine procurement even more infuriating and outrageous,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.
The former city boss is among a half-dozen Democrats vying to represent the newly created 10th Congressional District, which spans large swaths of brownstone Brooklyn and lower Manhattan — including the West Village, which is the historic five-borough center of the gay community .
He was quickly joined in the outrage by Lower East Side Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who demanded that the White House either immediately order an FDA review or accept approval from European regulators.
“We have $2 billion of US-funded vaccines sitting in storage in Europe, and I urge the FDA to immediately review or provide one-time reciprocity of completed reviews in the EU so that we can get these vaccines to the people who want them as as soon as possible,” the two-term lawmaker said in a statement.
Lower East Side Councilwoman Carlina Rivera asked Biden to immediately order an FDA review or accept approval from European regulators. William Farrington
Another challenger, Daniel Goldman — a lawyer and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who is best known for leading the first impeachment hearings for then-President Donald Trump — also added to the growing chorus of outrage.
“In such a serious public health situation, the FDA must be able to rely on the well-respected EU regulatory system,” he said. “We need to learn our lesson from COVID and do everything we can to get out of monkeypox before it becomes an epidemic.”
Public health activists in New York disclosed the existence of the millions of ready-to-ship doses in a letter they sent to the White House on June 28 demanding that the FDA take action, which they say has been ignored.
President Biden was grilled by Democrats in New York over monkeypox vaccines. AFP via Getty Images
The White House has defended the administration’s efforts to combat the monkeypox outbreak, while rejecting calls to allow the use of European inspections.
“The FDA is the gold standard and has an obligation to ensure that only products that meet its standards for the American people, including its vaccines, are available here,” said a spokesman, who referred questions about the details to the FDA.
An FDA spokeswoman said it had “expedited” the inspection, but did not say whether it had begun or been completed — or, if not already underway, provided any details about when it might begin or how long it would take.
“This is a test of how the U.S. responds to a new disease threat,” said Dr. Jay Varma, an infectious disease expert who helped oversee New York’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The US was as prepared as it could be. There’s a test, there’s a vaccine, and there’s a supply of it. And yet we continue to see delays in the federal bureaucracy’s ability to get all those things that the taxpayer paid for to the people who need them the most,” he added. “If this was a smallpox bioterrorist attack, would we have let the bureaucracy hold the shots? This is a real matter of national security.”
Daniel Goldman has joined the chorus of New York Democrats speaking out against President Biden’s monkeypox vaccine incident. Ron Sachs – CNP
The growing outcry over the short doses came as the number of monkeypox cases continued to rise, reaching a total of 160 on Friday. That’s up 44 percent from the 111 reported on Tuesday — and nearly double the 87 reported at this time last week.
And it comes as the local and federal response continues to be hit by a national shortage of the two-dose JYNNEOS inoculation, testing problems and computer problems at the city health department’s vendor managing vaccination appointments.
The shortage is such that New York City — home to 8.8 million people — has received only 7,000 doses of the vaccine so far and is delaying the scheduling of second shots in an effort to expand the number of residents who can get partial protection from the first dose.
Meanwhile, testing remains limited even as private labs come online because the only approved procedure requires patients to have lesions or rashes that can be swabbed, limiting checks to advanced cases.
Supply shortages and testing problems have in turn made the vaccine the only sure answer authorities can provide – but the company chosen by the DOHMH to run the operation, MedRite, has seen its computer system suffer a series of high-profile failures.
The company has a $36 million contract with DOHMH, which was initially to provide services related to the COVID vaccination campaign.
The agency declined Friday to make a copy of the contract available for review and said it could only be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, a process that could take years.
Monkeypox is a disease that spreads primarily through skin-to-skin contact, which can cause fever, flu-like symptoms, and is often characterized by painful lesions or rashes.
“Anyone can get and spread monkeypox,” the DOHMH wrote in its latest public guidance.
He added: “The current cases are spreading primarily among the social networks of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, so this community is currently at greater risk of exposure.”
Public health officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that the virus can be transmitted just as easily among heterosexual as among gay men, among whom many of the early outbreaks clustered.
Many of these early cases were traced to parties, clubs or other activities in Europe that catered to gay men – especially younger men – where banter and other intimate contact was common and often encouraged.
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