51ÊÓƵ

The Biden administration on Thursday declared the growing monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency, a rare designation signaling that the virus now represents a significant risk to Americans and setting in motion new measures aimed at containing the threat. The declaration by Xavier Becerra, President Biden’s health secretary, marks just the fifth such national emergency since 2001. (Stolberg and Mandavilli, 8/4)

The public-health emergency would ramp up coordination across federal agencies, increase communication with states and localities and help the administration develop new strategies to distribute vaccines and treatments, said Robert Fenton, the White House’s national monkeypox response coordinator. It will also make it easier for public-health agencies to get information from various jurisdictions. Mr. Fenton said testing capacity has expanded from 6,000 tests a week to 80,000 tests a week. (Mosbergen, Armour and Whyte, 8/4)

In other news, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine today asks officials to consider clinical trials of tecovirimat (Tpoxx)—an antiviral drug approved for treating smallpox—to test for efficacy against monkeypox. Scientists from the FDA, CDC, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases asked for the drug to be tested under the FDA's Animal Rule. (Soucheray, 8/4)

Monkeypox was supposed to be different ... Yet the United States now has the world's biggest outbreak of monkeypox: More than 6,600 Americans have been diagnosed since mid-May. Rarely seen outside Africa before the spring, the virus, a less deadly cousin of smallpox, has now triggered a 26,000-person global emergency, reaching 83 countries, 76 of which had not historically seen the disease. (Weintraub, 8/4)