Monkeypox vaccine rollout marred by glitches in New York

The city is struggling to respond to a growing outbreak of monkeypox, the first major public health crisis since the start of the Covid pandemic.

VideoOfficials say New York City is 'epicenter' of coronavirus outbreak monkeypox in the country and announced the opening of a vaccination clinic in Harlem and the reopening of another in Chelsea.CreditCredit...Hiram Durán for The New York Times

Thousands of New Yorkers spent hours refreshing a city government webpage this week, desperate for a vaccine against monkeypox which, for now, is primarily intended é for web-savvy and connected users. ccine, when finding a date could feel like winning a radio contest. The city has decided to assign appointments for the first doses of the highly sought-after monkeypox vaccine via an online system, using Twitter as the primary means of notifying people. The 2,500 appointments were completed within minutes.

On top of that, due to an issue, the first 600 appointments posted on Wednesday went only to those who had an old dating website stored on their browsers, as the slots appeared there before a link went live on the main Ministry of Health website.

"Following the instructions from the Department of Health, we had no chance of getting vaccinated," said Nicholas Diamond, who spent hours refreshing the city's website looking for a vaccine. "I'm really concerned that the city, state, and feds haven't learned anything from the Covid response, and essentially the onus has been left on us again to figure out how to take care of ourselves." /p>

New York City is the epicenter of the nation's monkeypox outbreak, its health commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan told a conference release Thursday, with 141 cases recorded so far, more than any other US city. The disease is mainly spreading among men who have sex with men, and experts believe there could be many more cases than have been detected so far.

The spreading epidemic has not yet caused any deaths in the United States, but it can cause very painful lesions that take weeks to disappear.

With another frightening virus spreading through their community, many gay New Yorkers have pinned their hopes on getting the Jynneos vaccine, the safer of the two vaccines available that can prevent smallpox. monkey. But the distribution errors caused anger and frustration. The first 1,000 doses of Jynneos, which arrived two weeks ago, were distributed at a single clinic, in Chelsea, with almost no public notice.

As a result , they went mostly to people who saw a post on Twitter or knew about the post in advance through public health connections.

Then The city's Department of Health said on Twitter at 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday that a second round of nominations would be coming soon. There was no further update until 1 p.m., when the department posted on Twitter that due to an "unfortunate glitch", the nominations we...