The White House is expected to declare monkeypox a public health emergency in the coming days, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Biden administration’s upcoming decision comes in light of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring the monkeypox outbreak as a global emergency on Saturday.
“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of WHO’s emergency committee.
“I know this has not been an easy or straightforward process and that there are divergent views among the members,” the health official added.
However, an article written by Dr. Robert Malone argued that the WHO’s declaration stands as a “direct contradiction of independent review panel advice.”
“Tedros made the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of the WHO’s emergency committee on the monkeypox outbreak, and in so doing overruled his own review panel, who had voted 9 against, 6 for declaring the PHEIC,” Malone wrote.
Declaring monkeypox to be a national health emergency means that it has the same distinction as the COVID-19 pandemic and would grant the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a slew of actions, including the ability to access new money and appoint new personnel.
A White House spokesperson said that Biden officials have been debating whether to declare monkeypox a nationwide emergency.
“I do think it deserves to be one,” said Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We’re having a lot of challenges around the country with their rate of rise in terms of new cases. It isn’t an emergency posing a high threat to the general population. But it’s still moving and has the potential to spread to additional vulnerable communities.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 16,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 72 countries since about May, with deaths only being reported in Africa so far.
Monkeypox symptoms appear one to two weeks after infection and initially include mostly flu-like symptoms such as fever, headaches, and shortness of breath. The WHO assured that the virus could be fatal for up to one-in-ten people only, and patients usually recover within two to four weeks without needing to be hospitalized.
