Our regulatory state is failing us, monkeypox edition

Roy Gulick wants to give his monkeypox patients the best possible care. But he and his doctors simply don’t have enough hours in the day to complete dozens of pages of paperwork every time they need to pry medicine out of the Strategic National Stockpile.

And that’s just what has been required for a single patient. His team has treated more than a dozen.

“It’s been a very daunting task,” said Gulick, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine. “There’s a ton of paperwork, there’s a ton of assessments that are required, there’s a tremendous amount that one has to do to be able to administer this drug to someone.”

Physicians’ struggles to prescribe Tpoxx, an antiviral approved to treat smallpox, which is from the same family of viruses as monkeypox, are among a slew of obstacles related to testing, treatment and vaccination that experts say is contributing to a plodding national response that they fear is not keeping up with the virus’s spread. Some worry that the window is closing to prevent the virus from becoming permanently entrenched in this country, with more than 1,400 confirmed infections across 42 states — and hundreds or thousands of additional infections suspected, predominantly in the gay and bisexual community.

Here is more from The Washington Post.