Newsy Tonight With Chance Seales - Dr. Adam Brown
The Biden administration announced just yesterday it is making access to monkeypox vaccines more widespread than before. A White House statement reads in part, quote, Collectively the administration's efforts in to expand vaccination for individuals at risk and make testing more convenient for health care providers and patients across the Y. But exactly who is at risk? Well, it's not a mystery. It's just not being talked about a lot. It's game in and bisexual men and the gay community is getting more vocal saying health officials have left them an educated, unprepared, unprotected Twitter users in New York City reporting only one doctor at the health Department's handling testing and consulting. Look at this little to no advance notice for vaccine clinics in the city and have a areas with long lines. Word of mouth, limited supply. Eventually they're turning people away. Needless to say, frustrations mounting begging the question, should the fda should the CDC
00:01:00
be doing more and speaking more explicitly about this. Adam Brown joins us tonight. He's a doctor in emergency medicine. Doctor Brown monkeypox is spreading in the U.S. Mostly among gay men. Signs just wrote putting in the uk 151 of 152 cases where gaming. A increase stigma. You think back to that big a cancer headlines of the 1980's with AIDS that was circulating. But if you do know who's at risk, don't you normally warning them and treat them specifically?
>> Yes, a chance. I think that's a really good point. And again, it pre show you having me on again to talk about this because this is a really important issue. Doctor Roberts was saying earlier in this diwas mostly in Africa and now we've seen it spread into Europe. Nuland, the United States and around the globe 50 countries more than 95% cases had been with game in a bisexual men and trans women. But I just to be clear, anyone can get this
00:02:01
disease within pregnant women. Children can get the disease. And we're starting to see in Europe. Children get this, which is raise the flag that this is starting to spread outside the community. But to your we need to have targeted messaging. 2 gay and bisexual men because that's what we're seeing right At the same time, we need to be getting a message out broadly to the general population that anyone can get this disease. And that's a way to reduce the stigma. Well, at the same time, getting the right targeted messages to the right community where the problems is high at
>> Well, kuz inching lot of gaming on Twitter. They show right now. And most of them, I should say, are Biden supporters, one person who's not into Sullivan, he's a good conservative, but he is HIV positive. And he wrote this, quote, The Fed's own a million doses of an effect of monkeypox vaccine. They're offering just 36,000 to game in the U.S.. The rest is stuck in fda bureaucracy. He continues the responses to this. Our show 1983 this
00:03:03
another way expand. Meanwhile, it tears through a community and as you said, viruses don't , where they're finding a host. The it sounds like the government you believe should be more explicit here.
>> Oh, absolutely. He. And their response has been slow. And tell you, I've been frustrated, I think posting on linkedin and Twitter even wrote an article in the Washington Blade a few weeks ago about the concern about monkeypox. And yet here we are. Finally we're seeing an emergency command response center and the CDC and the White House saying something about it. And looking here in DC We have 50 or 60,000 gay a clinic open on Monday or Tuesday. The 300 appointments were gone within an hour. We've got to do better. We know how to do better. If we haven't learned the last 2 and half years, you've got to get ahead of the curve of an I'm not saying that's where we are yet, but we've got to get ahead of this
00:04:03
thing to really tamp down the spread.
>> Walk me through that, if you would, can we get this whole thing because we just have these huge pride event, drinking dancing sex prime time for spreading this. Can we stop it?
>> You know, honestly, I wish I could look into my crystal ball and say yes, not really sure because the ways to stop it are good education, but also vaccines, treatment and testing. I mean, frankly, if we're mostly testing game in, we're going to game and have the disease. We've got to expand our testing. We've got to do more broad based surveillance. We've also got to allow more vaccines to be out in the community, not just in gay and bisexual and trans women communities. They also got to be in larger urban centers as well. And then we see the numbers of vaccines that are being released. Okay, great. We need to much further than that because we do know this disease is deadly. We know that it's much more concerning for immunocompromised individuals and also with children and
00:05:04
pregnant women and causing miscarriages. So we don't want to just only focus on gay men. We need to focus more more concerted response. But it appears the disease is mostly there. Now we need to do what we can to take care of those.
