[music]

Xavier Becerra: I will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This is Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra last week.

Xavier Becerra: Were prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Currently, there are around 9,000 known cases in the US with over 90% occurring among men who reported recently having sex or intimate contact with other men. Now according to a Health and Human Services press release, the emergency declaration is intended to help accelerate the Biden administration's response to the virus, including expanded access to vaccinations and testing.

The Biden administration has taken steps to increase the supply of Jynneos. It's the only approved monkeypox vaccine in the US. But according to The Washington Post, the US only has enough full two-dose vaccines for about 1/3 of the people who are considered most at risk. That's men who have sex with men, and no new supply is expected before October.

The New York Times reports that the shortage is due in part to the fact that millions of doses in the Strategic National Stockpile were allowed to expire.

The US which is poured nearly 2 billion into developing an MPXV vaccine has stockpiled only raw vaccine. In other words, they're in containers that aren't bottled for individual use. Against that backdrop, a new report in The Times says that the administration has decided to recommend a new method of vaccination, intradermal injection, which uses just 1/5 of a dose into the skin rather than a full dose into the underlying fat in order to stretch the supply. After last week's public health emergency declaration, it was another announcement from the Biden administration that caught my eye.

Doctor Alondra Nelson, Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, along with several of her colleagues published a statement calling for research about monkeypox to be shared openly among academics from different nations. Leaders from 20 different countries partner with Dr. Nelson on this request. Was there a demand that made me want to understand and know more about the importance of sharing data during a public health crisis? Here with me now is Dr. Alondra Nelson. Dr. Nelson, thanks for coming back on The Takeaway.

Dr. Alondra Nelson: Thank you for having me, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to start first with terminology. We heard there from the Secretary, the language of monkeypox, I think that's the colloquial, but I know there was also a bit of a movement to start using the language MPXV. Where should we in media, in our conversations, what terminology should we be using?

Dr. Alondra Nelson: I think that communities should use whatever name makes most sense to them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Part of the reason I start with just the terminology was experience I had this weekend in taking my daughter back to college. She said to me, "Mom, are you sure I should be going back to campus? Back to a college campus because now that monkeypox has been declared as a public health emergency, aren't we returning at this moment basically to the COVID experience that I'd had?" That she had as a first-year student in college?

I thought, "Oh, no, I'm sure it's quite different than that. Let's sit down and take a look at the research together to put your mind at ease." Then it turned out that simply sitting down to find the facts was a little harder than I expected. Maybe you can just help me and other parents or caregivers or just folks moving around in the world to understand what are some of the basic facts we know and then when you and your colleagues were asking for research, what are some of the pieces that we're still looking to try to understand?

Dr.Alondra Nelson: Monkeypox is a different virus from COVID. It is not as transmissible, right? It's spread through close contact, skin touching skin, very close face-to-face contact, touching objects that have had prolonged contact with the skin of somebody who's been infected with monkeypox, like sheets or towels. The headline here is that we don't need to do lockdowns or avoid public spaces. We just need to be aware that this is a new risk factor in our lives and we need to take precautions.

Anyone can get it and if you think you might have it is the case that you should isolate so you don't spread it and you should try to get testing. If you can't isolate, you could wear long sleeves, your pants to cover your skin or lesions that you might to help reduce the risk of spread. There's still more that we need to know about it, but it is not as transmissible in the same way as COVID.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yet, it is a public health crisis. Help me to understand in your role and then the role of your colleagues and counterparts, both in other parts of the federal government as well as abroad. What is it that you all are asking for when you are making this plea for research to become widely shared as a way of addressing a public health crisis?

Dr.Alondra Nelson: Sure. My office, the Office of Science and Technology Policy works more in the space of galvanizing research and this is what we've done in calling on the international publishing community to make research more readily accessible and available. Monkeypox is at this critical juncture. It has been endemic in a few places, and now it is spreading relatively rapidly and in new places around the world. You quoted, you began with my colleague, Secretary Becerra, and the Department of Health and Human Services is moving rapidly in the day-to-day to really mitigate and contain the risks of the disease.

As a complement to that, and as part of the Biden-Harris administration's response to monkeypox. My office, given the urgency of the situation, has taken a couple of steps in recent weeks. One is that in July, we organized a monkeypox research priorities team understanding that as this disease is spreading, that we need to know much more about it. We organized experts from across the US government to outline a set of research priorities that can, we hope, accelerate the science and enable both the United States and communities around the world to have a better response, a more informed response to the outbreak.

As you mentioned, we also as part of these research priorities have called on-- We coordinated 20 allies and partners to science and technology leaders including colleagues from Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, Italy, Japan, and others to call on the publishing community to make this research more accessible. It is an international effort, and we hope that making results and data related to monkeypox more immediately available will mean that we will unlock research that can help accelerate scientific discovery and ultimately improve health.

In response to that call, we've been really gratified that the publishing community has really responded so the Journal of the American Medical Association Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine and Science just in the US alone, as well as the National Library of Medicine, have all committed to making this monkeypox related research available and publicly accessible.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One of the things that we heard repeatedly from researchers, from epidemiologists, public health professionals during COVID-19 was that a focus on individual symptoms and an individual vulnerability to COVID-19 would sometimes lead us to miss the ways that COVID-19 was moving down the vectors of pre-existing inequities, right? African American communities, Latino communities, those who worked on frontlines having these increased vulnerabilities.

In the case of monkeypox, we have what feels to me like a bit of an uncomfortable public conversation either happening or not happening in part because of what we know here that in the past, HIV AIDS was stigmatized as a result of the vector of inequality that it moved down initially. Initially among men who have sex with men and then into other communities also stigmatized. How important is it for us to on the one hand address the realities of the most vulnerable communities, but also not generate a disinterest in monkeypox and in its capacity to spread by talking about the communities where at the moment it is most concentrated?

Dr.Alondra Nelson: I think Melissa you really articulate the line that we need to walk really clearly. It is the case that there is a particular impact on LGBTQIA communities right now and particularly men who have sex with men. Of course, we need to really invest our resources.

We need to make sure that that community is being engaged and brought as a partner into the response that's taking place right now, One of the lessons that we've learned from HIV aids decades on is that infectious diseases, viruses travel through whole communities ultimately. While we need to focus on the particular community right now, it's also the case that monkeypox can impact any of us and so we need to have a really collective response here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Apparently there's a current shortage of vaccines mostly because of packaging, is that right? Just do you have a sense of how we ended up so short? Is this a sense of having felt we were invulnerable? What happened here?

Dr. Alondra Nelson: I think I would refer you to my colleagues at the department of health and human services but as I understand it, we had some vaccines in a stockpile that expired and then some vaccines we have all of the raw materials that we need to produce them, that need to be refined and finalized so they can be distributed. That is part of what secretary Becerra and his leadership and declaring a public health emergency is allowing is for all of this to accelerate more quickly.

All of that is happening. Then as you suggested, there are part of why we need more research is to, in fact, think about, are there different ways to distribute and also inject vaccines, are there different techniques, are there different vaccines, and different dosages that might work to mitigate the disease. We're working urgently on parallel tracks here. The urgent response that HHS is leading as well as our new colleagues and the white house monkeypox response office that was stood up in the last week.

Also thinking about these research innovation and other pieces and pivoting to do that quite as quickly as we possibly can. This is why it's critical that the response and research work hand in hand that allow us to do to the extent that we can real-time innovation and pivoting to get people the care that they need.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dr. Alondra Nelson, Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Alondra Nelson: Thank you for having me, Melissa.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.