San Francisco could be close to declaring a public health crisis over the rising number of cases of monkeypox virus in the city, California state Sen. Scott Wiener said on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the San Francisco Department of Public Health tweeted that its walk-in clinic has been forced to close after running out of vaccine doses. About 1,700 residents of the city have received the monkeypox vaccine as of Wednesday, according to the DPH.
Wiener, a Democrat, said in a statement that the vaccination rate is not increasing fast enough, and that "failure to control this outbreak" poses a danger to residents' health.
"We need an enormous amount of additional vaccine doses, and we need it immediately. The federal government's failures are threatening to deeply harm our community," he continued. "Once we move past this emergency, we need accountability for these failures — failures that put people's lives and health in jeopardy."
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday urged the federal government to increase availability of monkeypox vaccines in response to rising case numbers across the country.
"Invoke the Defense Production Act to fill the need for vaccines in the U.S.," De Blasio, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Congress in New York, said in a statement. "There really is no time to waste in a crisis like this, and there is so much that federal and city officials can do right now to get control of this crisis."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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