Tony's Diary Package — page 983

t Peter Staley: The Guardian - Gay community in revolt about monkeypox. Article about Peter Staley: 'Nobody's acting like this is an emergency': Act Up veteran Peter Staley condemns US monkeypox response Wilfred Chan Rochelle has pleaded with me to back the CDC plan of distributing vaccine more on the basis of at risk population then on the actual number of cases since it is anticipated that with a variety of gay pride galas coming up including "Southern Decadence" among others that although there are not a lot of cases in the southern states including Louisiana, there will be soon and although New York City and other large cities but particularly in New York City is hammering the White House about the lines that there are to get vaccine in people who perceive themselves and in fact are practicing risk behavior even though they have not been in direct documented contact with an infected person. The White House is responding to the complaints of the gay community that the response to the monkeypox outbreak has been a terrible disaster (see above with Peter Staley) and they are pushing Rochelle and the secretary to distribute it favoring New York since they have the most cases. Rachel wants me and I agree to back her in making it a 75% on risk and 25% on cases whereas the White House wants the distribution to be 25% on risk and 75% on cases. I believe that this is short sighted because we are quickly going to see areas that do not have a lot of cases now but will very soon not having enough vaccine to prevent the outbreak. I was very forceful in the zoom call with the secretary and the HHS team in saying that I would back Rochelle; however, we must have the flexibility of apportioning doses to the at risk locations in small allocations so that if they don't use them we will not have given them all of their doses at one time and thus cannot recall them to give them to cities and locations that actually have a large number of cases. Once you send doses to a location, by FDA regulations, you can't pull them back and send them somewhere else. And so smaller allocations are the answer. Whether or not Ron Klain will accept this is a big question. He is very interested in the political blowback from New York. This is understandable since he is a politician but he is not looking at it from a purely public health standpoint. I was very forceful with the HHS team when the comms people were suggesting that we explain this gap that we have in availability of vaccines on the lack of funding. I told the secretary on the zoom that I have to be frank with them, but I thought that this would be a total disaster since that is an excuse and not an explanation and the gay community would kill them for making excuses. I mentioned that we had to own the problem and tell them that it would have been nice to have all the doses that everybody needed, but the fact is we don't have all the doses and therefore we will do everything we can to get as many doses to people as we can in an equitable manner. Bottom line is that I told them what I told the Trump administration, and that is the only way to solve a problem is to first own the problem.