The city’s health commissioner said New York needed tens of thousands more vaccines.
New York:
On a hot Sunday afternoon in New York, the epicenter of the US monkeypox outbreak, a long line of men aged 20 to 40 wait for a vaccine to protect themselves and their loved ones from the virus.
With its rows of tables and chairs and stacks of medical equipment, the vaccination center – a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn – is reminiscent of a vaccine spot for Covid-19, a virus for which New York was also the US epicenter.
Everyone who spoke to AFP while waiting in line said they felt lucky to have got an appointment, because New York is short of doses. On Friday, 9,200 time slots became available on the city’s dedicated website at 6:00 pm.
They were all gone in seven minutes.
Three days ago, the site traffic was so high that the page crashed.
“It was disappointing, especially because especially with Covid, you would think we would have a structured process or a vaccine rollout,” 23-year-old Aidan Baglivo told AFP. “There really was nothing there.”
‘shouldn’t be an issue’
Monkeypox infections climbed in the city of more than eight million people last week, with 461 cases reported on Friday since the US outbreak began in May.
This number is higher than the 223 cases on Monday.
Baglivo, a data analyst, said people who are most connected on social media are most likely to get a vaccine appointment.
Robert, who declined to give his last name, told AFP he sat at his computer refreshing the website “like a madman” until he found the slot.
“It shouldn’t be an issue because there’s already a vaccine, and it (the rollout) should be … to prevent it from becoming more of an issue,” the 28-year-old said. Neither his partner nor his best friend has been vaccinated.
“Every extra day where more people aren’t getting vaccinated is an awful lot.”
Anyone can catch monkeypox, which is spread through close physical contact, but the Genios vaccine is currently reserved for men who have sex with men, who make up the majority of cases.
Many LGBTQ people, of whom New York has a large population, worry that their community will be further stigmatized by the virus.
‘It’s important to be active’
The 42-year-old actor, Nathan Tylutki, wonders “if it wasn’t affecting queer people, there would be a quick response to develop more vaccines.”
In her opinion, there is not much anti-vaccine sentiment in the LGBTQ community “because we have seen the disease, we know what the AIDS epidemic was”.
“We know it’s important to be proactive about these kinds of things,” he told AFP.
Monkeypox is characterized by sores on the skin – which can appear on the genitals or mouth – and is often accompanied by fever, sore throat, and pain in the lymph nodes. It usually gets better on its own but can be extremely painful.
New York, on the US East Coast, has already administered or prescribed 21,500 vaccines and hopes to expedite the process, promising more than 30,000 jabs for the entire state.
But due to dose constraints, the Bushwick site is not expected to reopen on Monday.
City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said on Sunday that New York needed tens of thousands more vaccines.
Leroy Jackson, the fitness instructor at the Bushwick site, has another concern.
“I’m probably one of two or three black people on this line” out of over 100, said the 27-year-old.
He said access to appointments for minorities and disadvantaged groups is even more limited.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)