A monkeypox vaccine clinic at San Francisco General Hospital opened long queues Wednesday morning and turned down many people, ABC7 reported.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health has requested 35,000 vaccines, but only received 3,580 in an initial shipment and another 4,163 this week, “which will be used in a few days,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. letter he wrote to federal health officials and posted on Twitter Wednesday morning.
Cases of monkeypox are on the rise in San Francisco, prompting state and local leaders to ask federal health officials for more vaccines to meet the growing demand from residents who want to get vaccinated but are being turned down at clinics.
The number of cases of smallpox in the city has increased to 141, more than the 86 cases just a few days ago. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 2,322 cases of painful but rarely fatal viral disease, mostly caused by a rash. California has reported 356 cases since July 19, more than a third in San Francisco. In all, California has the second largest number of known cases in any state, after New York, the CDC said.
Breed wrote in his letter that this “is a critical point in the spread of this virus and we need to take more urgent action.”
San Francisco now has 141 cases of smallpox diagnosed, more than most states. We need more vaccines to protect our higher-risk LGBTQ community and to curb the spread. pic.twitter.com/i3GeSHXxa6
– London Breed (@LondonBreed) July 20, 2022
The public health department is allocating doses of Jynneos, the only vaccine specifically approved to prevent monkeypox, to clinics across the city, including Kaiser Permanente (to find a full list of locations and make an appointment at San Francisco, visit the department’s website). The department reserves the vaccine for gay and bisexual men, as well as for sex workers and people with known exposure to monkeypox.
Anyone can contract monkeypox through close physical contact with an infected person, but the current outbreak in North America and Europe is disproportionately affecting men who have sex with other men. While public health officials and doctors are eager to avoid stigmatizing the virus, there is some concern among experts that avoiding the issue may prevent valuable information from reaching people most likely to be affected. Science journalist Benjamin Ryan, for example, wrote in a July 18 Washington Post opinion piece that public health officials are doing a poor job of not conveying “the severity of this growing crisis to gay men and bisexuals “.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, along with 10 other lawmakers, defended the gay community in a letter Wednesday addressed to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Gay and bisexual men, transgender people and other people at risk desperately want the vaccine to protect themselves and those around them,” Wiener wrote. “However, instead of quickly mobilizing in a mass vaccination campaign with this existing safe and effective vaccine, many of our counties do not have the supply to vaccinate everyone looking for the vaccine. In San Francisco, for example , people have been queuing up to 9 o’clock in the hope of getting a scarce vaccine. “