Local experts offer Monkeypox update; D.C. has only 10% of vaccine doses needed

washingtonblade.com:

A panel of four medical and local health officials provided the latest information about the monkeypox outbreak in the nation’s capital and answered a wide range of questions from an audience of more than 100 people on Monday night at a Monkeypox Town Hall meeting sponsored jointly by the D.C.

Department of Health and the Washington Blade. Among those attending the event, which was held at the Eaton Hotel in downtown D.C., were representatives of several local LGBTQ organizations and many who self-identified as members of the city’s diverse LGBTQ community.

Also attending was Japer Bowles, director of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs. The panelists included emergency healthcare physician N.

Adam Brown, who served as moderator of the event; Clover Barnes, Senior Deputy Director of the D.C. Department of Health’s HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Administration, known as HAHSTA; Amanda Cary, nurse practitioner and manager of the Sexual Health Clinic at Whitman-Walker Health; and Alsean Bryant, the strategic response team pharmacist at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s Wellness Clinics in Temple Hills, Md., and on Capitol Hill in D.C. “We’re here to try to give you the best information we have,” said physician Brown in opening the Town Hall event. “Unfortunately, there are some things that are realities for us with monkeypox,” he said. “The first is, we are learning about this new strain and this new manifestation of the disease on a day-by-day basis,” he continued, noting that while monkeypox has been around since the 1950s, its recent movement outside of Africa to other parts of the world is a new phenomenon. “Number two, we are woefully – I don’t want to use the word unprepared, but we don’t have the