On a hot Sunday afternoon in New York, the epicenter of the US monkeypox outbreak, a long line of men aged 20 to 40 are waiting for a vaccine to protect themselves and their loved ones from the virus.
The vaccination center — a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn — with its rows of tables and chairs and stacks of medical equipment, evokes a vaccination site for Covid-19, a virus for which New York was also the US epicenter.
Everyone who spoke to AFP in line said they were happy to be able to get an appointment as New York is short on cans. At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, 9,200 time slots became available on the city’s dedicated website.
They were all gone within seven minutes.
Three days earlier, website traffic was so high that the site crashed.
“It was frustrating, especially because with Covid in particular, you would think that we would have more of a structured process or a vaccine rollout,” Aidan Baglivo, 23, told AFP. “It just wasn’t really anything.”
– “Should not be a problem” –
The city of more than eight million saw a spike in monkeypox infections last week, with 461 cases recorded on Friday since the US outbreak began in May.
That number is up from 223 cases on Monday.
Baglivo, a data analyst, found that people who are most connected on social media have the highest chance of getting a vaccination appointment.
Robert, who declined to give his last name, told AFP he sat at his computer updating the site “like a madman” until he got a spot.
“This shouldn’t be a problem as there is already a vaccine and it (the introduction) … should be more efficient to prevent it from becoming a bigger problem,” the 28-year-old said. Neither his partner nor his best friend could get vaccinated.
“Any extra day that doesn’t get more people vaccinated sucks.”
Anyone can get monkeypox, which is spread through close physical contact, but the Jynneos vaccine is currently reserved for men who have sex with men, which accounts for the vast majority of cases.
Many LGBTQ people, of which there are large numbers in New York, fear further stigmatization of their community due to the virus.
– ‘Important to be proactive’ –
Nathan Tylutki, a 42-year-old actor, wonders if “there would be a quicker response to developing more vaccines if it didn’t affect queer people.”
He says there’s not a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment in the LGBTQ community because “because we’ve seen disease, we know what the AIDS epidemic was like.”
“We know it’s important to be proactive about things like this,” he told AFP.
Monkeypox is characterized by lesions on the skin – which can appear on the genitals or in the mouth – and is often accompanied by fever, sore throat and pain in the lymph nodes. It usually clears up on its own but can be very painful.
New York on the US east coast has already either administered or planned 21,500 vaccines and hopes to speed up the process, promising more than 30,000 vaccinations for the entire state.
However, due to missing cans, the Bushwick location is not expected to reopen on Monday.
The city’s Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said Sunday New York needs tens of thousands more vaccines.
In line at the Bushwick location, fitness trainer Leroy Jackson has another concern.
“I’m one of maybe two or three blacks on that line,” out of more than 100, the 27-year-old said.
Access to appointments for minorities and disadvantaged groups is even more limited, he stressed.
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