Hotair
On a slow news day like today, why not check in on a topic we haven’t visited in a while?
Tell me if this sounds familiar. A deadly virus begins spreading undetected in the United States, threatening to burst beyond the ability of quarantine and therapeutics to stop it. But the feds are slow to act. They can’t get their act together on testing; the CDC puts out misleading information; commercial laboratories are underutilized in the early effort to spot cases. America ends up flying blind for months about the extent of community transmission until the virus becomes so prevalent that it can’t be contained.
It happened with COVID. It’s happening again with monkeypox, experts tell WaPo. Except this time, the guy in charge is the one who got elected promising to “shut down” that other virus (which he failed to do). The professionals were supposed to be back in charge in Washington as of January 2021.
Yet many of the errors of 2020 are being repeated now, albeit on a mercifully much smaller scale.
Biden doesn’t even have the excuse that Trump did of having to cope with a novel virus about which nothing was known. Scientists know all about monkeypox: They know how it spreads, they know how to stop it. They even have a vaccine ready to go. In circumstances like those, you’d expect a germ to be stopped cold.
But it’s still spreading among Americans. Experts are sounding the alarm, hoping to wake up the powers that be:
Communication about whom to test, when to test them and what monkeypox symptoms look like has been dismal, said Sauer, a public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center…
Clinicians, patients and some administration officials have faulted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing criteria that they say are too narrow and have resulted in long waits — sometimes multiple days — in identifying positive cases. Under the current framework, physicians who want a test for an individual suspected to have monkeypox must first consult with a state epidemiologist. State public health officials say that protocol helps identify people at highest risk so doctors can recommend isolation and take other steps to prevent community spread…
And just as in early 2020, when the coronavirus first menaced the United States, federal officials at first limited monkeypox testing to a network of several dozen public health laboratories — and did not authorize thousands of commercial laboratories and hospitals to perform their own testing, too…
The response has also been hindered by U.S. physicians’ lack of familiarity with the disease. The CDC initially publicized decades-old photos from more severe outbreaks in Africa, instead of the more subtle rashes detected in the recent global outbreak. The United States was far slower than Britain and Canada to distribute updated education materials, only recently sharing photos showing what the rashes look like on fair skin, said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
One patient in New York City showed up to a clinic this month with flu-like symptoms and swollen lymph nodes…
