Monkeypox vaccine

For weeks, Austin tech worker Taylor Scot Harrell desperately tried to get the monkeypox vaccine ahead of his vacation so that he wouldn't contract a ...

Because of that, Harrell finally qualified for the vaccine — which he received about a week before leaving town for his trip to Europe. “It’s a huge concern,” said Dr. Vandana Shrikanth, an infectious disease expert and a medical director at Legacy Community Health, which also fields daily requests for the vaccine. “We send stuff out to our patients about it and what to be aware of, the risk factors, because there’s a lot of fear,” he said. Instead, it’s relying more on local health networks to get the word out quickly and efficiently to people at high risk of contracting it, Van Deusen said. Demand for the monkeypox vaccine in Texas appears to be growing as cases of the virus are increasingly reported in the state’s metropolitan cities. “This will not only increase testing capacity but also make it more convenient for providers and patients to access tests by using existing provider-to-laboratory networks.” There is clearly a mobilization of this vaccine in those cities. “There are obvious channels being put in place by East and West coast cities to make sure that this vaccine is available. In Texas, health officials are allowing doses only for those with known exposure, although other states where counts are higher have gotten more doses than they can use for a broader range of high-risk recipients. “There’s nothing peculiar to that population (of men who have sex with men) that makes them more susceptible,” Van Deusen said. A global emergency is WHO’s highest level of alert, but the designation does not necessarily mean a disease is particularly transmissible or lethal. Anyone can get the virus, which has no known long-term chronic effects and rarely leads to hospitalization.