The announcement will come from the Department of Health and Human Services. As cases in the U.S. rise, the administration has sometimes been criticized for its handling of the outbreak, and some have called for the government to immediately declare a national emergency.
Since the identification of the first case of monkeypox in the United States in mid-May, more than 6,600 probable or confirmed cases have been detected in the United States. Cases have been identified in every state except Montana and Wyoming.
The declaration follows the World Health Organization’s announcement last month that monkeypox is a public health emergency of international concern. The WHO defines a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, as an “emergency event” that poses a “public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease” and “potentially requires a coordinated international response.”
Some cities and states, including New York, San Francisco, California, Illinois and New York, have already declared monkeypox a state of emergency, allowing them to free up funding and resources for their responses to the outbreak.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden named Robert Fenton the White House’s national monkeypox response coordinator. Fenton — a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that oversees Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada — will coordinate the federal government’s response to the outbreak. Dr. Demetrius Daskalakis, director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, serves as deputy coordinator.
The Biden administration has been heavily criticized by some public health experts for not taking faster action to address the crisis.
One of the criticisms of the administration’s response, as CNN reported earlier Thursday, was that HHS waited more than three weeks after the first confirmed case of monkeypox in the U.S. to order bulk supplies of the government-held monkeypox vaccine. and stored in Denmark, to be bottled and shipped to the US for distribution. The delay was in part due to concerns that once these vaccines are taken out of mass storage, they will lose years of shelf life.
Monkeypox can infect anyone, but the majority of cases in the U.S. outbreak are among men who have sex with men, including gay and bisexual men and people who identify as transgender. Close contact with an infected person is required for the monkeypox virus to spread, experts say.
The CDC initially announced that monkeypox vaccines were being released from the strategic national stockpile and offered to “high-risk” contacts of monkeypox patients as well as health care workers who treat them. Since then, federal health officials have expanded their vaccination efforts to focus on the broader community of men who have sex with men, the demographic group that accounts for most monkeypox cases in the US.
In addition to providing vaccines, the CDC said since June it has made a concerted effort to conduct extensive education and outreach to the LGBTQ community.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Jamie Humbrecht and Kate Sullivan contributed to this report.
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