The White House is teaming up with LGBT+ advocacy group GLAAD for a briefing on monkeypox, targeting various influencers in the LGBT+ community in hopes that they will share information about it to their followers, Politico reported.
The White House hopes to hold a briefing with Ashish Jha, the White House’s director of Covid-19 response; as well as Demetre Daskalakis, the Center for Disease Control & Prevention’s director of the division of HIV/AIDS prevention; and John Brooks, who leads the epidemiology and research research in the same division of the CDC.
The goal for the briefing is to lay out who is most at risk, how the disease spreads, who can receive the vaccine for monkeypox and why the LGBT+ community is hit particularly hard by it.
President Joe Biden has previously said that “everyone” should be concerned about monkeypox, despite the CDC urging calm. Some experts have also warned that Mr Biden’s administration delayed its response not unlike how Donald Trump delayed his response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has warned against villifying the LGBT+ community in response to monkeypox and has said the medical community cannot make the same mistakes it did with HIV and AIDS.
“The lessons we learned from HIV helped us with Covid, and the lessons we learned from HIV are helping us with monkeypox”, Dr Fauci told The Independent earlier this year. “That's when you embrace the community and ask 'what is the best way to do that?' Rather than what would happen decades ago, when you had a bunch of people in high places in science and public health and regulation, making decisions about how to engage the community.”
Io Dodds contributed reporting.
