Health authorities are underestimating the scale of the response needed to prevent monkeypox becoming endemic in the UK, sexual health campaigners have warned, as a new vaccination campaign is launched.
The Terrence Higgins Trust urged the NHS and the UK’s Health Safety Agency to urgently pump cash into the system to pay more health workers to administer vaccines. He also wants to double the number of doses ordered to protect against a virus that has infected at least 2,208 people in the UK, according to the latest official figures.
Monkey pox is usually mild and is spread by close contact with an infected person or animal, but the risk of serious illness is greater in children, pregnant women and immunocompromised people.
The British Association for Sexual Health and HIV has estimated that at least 125,000 people will need vaccines, including gay men living with HIV, sex workers, staff at sexual health clinics and saunas. A double dose of the smallpox vaccine is needed. Last week, the NHS announced it had acquired at least 100,000 more doses. It asks people to wait until they are asked to come in for a vaccine, and prioritizes gay and bisexual men and men who have sex with men who engage in high-risk behavior. Campaigners want more walk-in clinics amid “impatience” among those at risk.
“There must be one [vaccines] czar tasked with preventing this from becoming endemic,” said Richard Angell, director of campaigns at the Terrence Higgins Trust. “We cannot allow it to enter the system like chlamydia.”
In a letter to health secretary Steve Barclay on Saturday, Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: “I am concerned that you are not acting with the urgency required and that the response so far has not been co-ordinated by DHSC and NHS. England,” he said.
Labor said the vaccination program was already diverting resources from the provision of core sexual health services, including anti-HIV therapies and long-term contraception.
“Your department has committed to achieving an 80% reduction in new HIV infections in England by 2025,” Streeting said. “It would be a scandal if they jeopardized progress to achieve this.”
NHS England, the Department of Health and Social Care and UKHSA have been contacted for comment.
On Saturday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared the multinational outbreak of monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern.
The body’s international health regulations emergency committee did not reach a consensus on whether the outbreak warranted the declaration, but Ghebreyesus said it was justified because the virus had “spread rapidly around the world through new modes of transmission of which we understand too little.”
It said the risk of smallpox was “moderate” globally and “high” in Europe and there was “a clear risk of further international spread”.
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The UKHSA said last week that transmission continues to occur mainly within interconnected sex networks. “More recent data suggests that the growth of the outbreak may have slowed,” he said. “This means we continue to identify new infections, but at a more stable rate.”
In a statement on Friday, Steve Russell, NHS director of vaccinations, said: “The NHS is now expanding its plans to vaccinate people, particularly in London… Thousands more will be invited shortly, with the expanded number of clinics. also… We ask people to wait to be contacted and to show up as soon as possible when they are invited to be vaccinated.”