NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Mayor Eric Adams said Friday that he's awaiting a decision from the city's senior health official about whether to declare a health emergency over the monkeypox outbreak.
LISTEN TO 1010 WINS
Adams said the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, is looking into it now.
“He’s still making that determination,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference. “It will free up and allow me to do certain things.”
The mayor’s comments come a day after the state’s health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, declared monkeypox “an imminent threat to public health.”
The declaration will allow local health departments to access additional state reimbursement after other federal and state funding sources run out, Basset said.
“I assure you that the city Health Department has very much been looking forward to this declaration that monkeypox is an imminent threat to public health,” Bassett told 1010 WINS.
The state’s declaration is retroactive to June 1 and will remain in effect through the end of 2022.
San Francisco took the step Thursday of declaring monkeypox a “local public health emergency.” New York City hasn’t yet gone that far despite having the highest virus caseload in the country.
Gothamist reported Thursday that a senior epidemiologist at the city Health Department was reassigned after criticizing the response to the growing outbreak. There has reportedly been internal disagreement about how best to contain monkeypox without stigmatizing the disease, which currently appears to mostly affect men who have sex with men.
“We don’t talk about personnel policies,” Adams said when asked about the reassignment. “But we do it in a fair way.”
New York state is in the process of receiving another 110,000 monkeypox vaccine doses from the federal government, with 80,000 of those doses headed for the five boroughs.
Adams said the city is only now beginning to get its fair share of vaccines despite being an epicenter where demand for vaccinations is high.
“All of the vaccines that we have, and all of the appointments, are out,” the mayor said Friday.
“We were not receiving our proportionate share, and the White House has attempted to correct that. And as we get [the vaccines] in, we’re setting up appointments right away,” Adams said.
As of Thursday, 1,251 people in the city have tested positive for suspected monkeypox, but “many more cases” have likely gone undiagnosed, according to NYC.gov.
There were more than 4,600 reported monkeypox cases in the U.S. as of Thursday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Related
Related
Related
