The Biden administration will announce a new emergency declaration as early as Tuesday afternoon that would allow providers to inject a fifth of the currently authorized dose into the skin, rather than a full dose into the underlying fat. The move was first reported by the New York Times.
The move comes less than a week after the Biden administration declared monkeypox a public health emergency, giving the US Food and Drug Administration and other government health agencies more flexibility to fight back against the spread of the virus.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said last week that the FDA was considering a plan to stretch the doses.
“We are considering an approach for current doses of Jynneos that would allow healthcare providers to use an existing one-dose vial of the vaccine to administer a total of up to five separate doses,” Califf said Thursday.
As of Monday, the US government has shipped 617,693 doses of Jynneos smallpox vaccine to states and jurisdictions. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that at least 1.5 million people in the US are eligible for monkeypox vaccination.
The new method could expand the vaccine supply
Currently, the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine is given in two doses subcutaneously, meaning it is given under the skin. But with an intradermal vaccine, “basically, you stay on the skin; you don’t go through the skin,” said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University.
The use of a smaller dose by intradermal injection has been done with influenza and rabies vaccines, epidemiologist Dr. Jay Varma.
“The skin has special cells that are very good at helping a vaccine stimulate the body’s immune system,” he wrote.
These cells, called dendritic cells, are better able to produce an immune response, Griffin said.
“They live in the skin and are better at teaching the immune system what to respond to,” he said.
“If you can give the monkeypox vaccine intradermally, you can give a smaller dose. … They would just have to have some kind of demonstration that you get the same immune response,” he said.
CNN’s Brenda Goodman and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.