Monkeypox shouldn’t spur Covid level of concern: Biden

TOKYO: US President Joe Biden sought to reassure Americans that the current monkeypox outbreak was unlikely to cause a pandemic on the scale of Covid.

“I just don’t think it rises to the level of the kind of concern that existed with Covid-19,” he told reporters on Monday in Tokyo at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The US has enough small pox vaccine stockpiled to deal with the outbreak, Biden said. Still, he said people should be cautious.

The president struck a more cautious note a day after telling reporters that the outbreak was “something everyone should be concerned about”, and that if it “were to spread, it would be consequential”. The rare and potentially deadly cousin of the smallpox virus is traditionally confined to regions in Africa, but health officials are concerned about its recent wider spread.

Confirmed and suspected cases have been ticking up in Europe and North America, including at least two confirmed cases in the US.

Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Sunday he wouldn’t be surprised if “a few more cases” emerged in the days ahead but that the virus is “not as contagious as Covid” and spreads “very differently”.

“So I am confident we’re going to be able to keep our arms around it,” Jha said.

Health authorities said they may have found a third case of the monkeypox virus in the US and are running tests on a patient in South Florida to confirm if the person has contracted the disease.

The case in Broward County, Florida, is “related to international travel”, the US Centers for Disease Control and the Florida department of health said in a statement on Sunday, “and the person remains isolated”.

I just don’t think it rises to the level of the kind of concern that existed with Covid-19.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. President