There have been seven suspected cases of monkeypox in the United States as of May 23, including one confirmed case in Massachusetts, according to ABC News.
Despite the concern that this could turn into another COVID-19 pandemic, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday that the U.S. government has 100 million doses of a smallpox vaccine in stock that would protect against monkeypox, according to NBC News.
There are two smallpox vaccines that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are kept in the Strategic National Stockpile. However, just one of the vaccines, Jynneos, has received FDA approval for use to treat monkeypox.
CDC officials said that there are more than 1,000 doses of Jynneos in stock that could be used for those who have tested positive for monkeypox or have been in close contact with someone who has.
The other smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, has not bee approved by the FDA for use to treat monkeypox, but that's the one the government has 100 million doses of in stock. There have also been two therapeutics approved by the FDA to treat monkeypox -- TPOXX and Tembexa.
Blossom Damania, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said that there is no need for mass concern regarding monkeypox.
"We have vaccines squirreled away by our government," Damania said. "I don’t think people need to be alarmed. Monkeypox is a serious disease. We need to respect it and take it seriously, but we don't need to panic."
Grant McFadden, the director of the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy at Arizona State University, said that even though the vaccines haven't been approved by the FDA to treat monkeypox, the test results have been effective.
"The drugs that have been approved for smallpox have not yet been approved for monkeypox. But there’s excellent data in the filings for the licensure of those drugs where they’ve been tested against monkeypox in monkeys, and it works very well," McFadden said.
Due to fears of another smallpox outbreak, the U.S. government has been building a stockpile of the Jynneos smallpox vaccine, and has spent more than $1 billion to do so.
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said that this was due to bioweapons and anthrax attacks in the early 2000s.
"There was a lot of concern about smallpox bioweapons attack, especially after the anthrax attacks in 2000," Hotez said. "It was known the USSR had been working on weaponized smallpox for years."
All of the monkeypox cases in the U.S. have been related to travel out of the country and have been seen only in men.
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