As of July 1, 460 cases of monkeypox have been confirmed across 31 states and Washington, D.C. That's up from 351 cases as of June 29.
California has the highest number of confirmed cases in the nation at 95, followed by New York, where 90 cases have been reported, according to the CDC. Globally, there have been more than 5,000 cases reported since May.
Three more updates:
1. On July 1, the World Health Organization's European Regional Director Dr. Hans Henri Kluge said monkeypox cases in Europe have tripled over the past two weeks. Since June 15, cases have tripled to more than 4,500 confirmed cases across European countries. Nearly 90 percent of all global cases since mid-May have been reported in Europe. While a WHO committee recently advised the outbreak does not constitute a global public health emergency at this time, "the rapid evolution and emergency nature of the event means that the committee will revisit its position shortly," Dr. Kluge said.
2. As the United States begins a vaccination campaign, experts warn there may not be enough supply due to complications on the manufacturing front. Jynneos, the only vaccine developed for monkeypox, was developed by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic. One of their manufacturing facilities was shut down for a planned expansion last August and is not expected to reopen until late this summer at the earliest, according to a July 1 New York Times report. Additional vaccines may not be available for at least six months after that. Bavarian Nordic is expected to send about 2 million doses to the United States by the end of the year but can produce less than five million for the rest of the world. Zain Rizvi, who studies access to medicines at the advocacy group Public Citizen, told the Times that if the number of monkeypox cases continues to rise unchecked, it could become permanently entrenched in several countries, which would lead to continuing outbreaks.
3. Infectious disease experts and public health advocates warn of the risk of the U.S. losing control of the monkeypox disease, mirroring the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. "We've been sort of screaming for a month about how bad the diagnostic situation is for monkeypox. And that was a really clear error, preventable, and it's very clear that this administration has not learned lessons from early COVID," James Krellenstein, co-founder of the HIV treatment advocacy group Prep4All, told The Hill. Jon Andrus, MD, an adjunct professor of global health at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington, D.C., told The Hill the U.S. is lucky monkeypox is not as contagious or as deadly as COVID-19, because the public health system is underfunded and overly fractured.