With the World Health Organization scrambling to reevaluate the outbreak and cases racking up in the U.S., the HHS ordered 144,000 monkeypox vaccines and said it plans to deploy the doses by July 11.
The latest order brings the nation's stockpile to about 4.5 million doses set aside for 2022 and 2023. All eyes are on one company, Bavarian Nordic, which is currently the only vaccine-maker with an authorized monkeypox vaccine, Jynneos. An older smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, can also be used but requires 15 jabs "vigorous enough" to draw blood, making it the less popular option.
As of July 7, the U.S. has confirmed 700 monkeypox cases across Washington, D.C., 24 states, and U.S. territory Puerto Rico, according to CDC data. About a week ago, that number was 306.
The global count passed 6,000 June 7, prompting the WHO to reconsider the threat in the next few weeks.
Similar to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lack of widespread testing is an issue for assessing the monkeypox risk. Health experts have been vocalizing concerns about the potential hidden risk for weeks.
"We're six weeks in, and we're still having problems with availability of testing and vaccine supply, all these issues that we saw with COVID," Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn., told Kaiser Health News. "Now, the prospects for containment are receding quickly."
The nation's timely response is what matters most, experts said.
"I'm still hopeful that we can accelerate contact tracing and the timing of detection to quarantine, isolation and vaccination of close contacts," Amira Albert Roess, PhD, a professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., told NBC News.
Health organizations have been clear to not draw too many parallels between COVID-19 and monkeypox, though, since no one in the U.S. has died from monkeypox during the current outbreak.