SF Mayor London Breed Declares Public Health Emergency Starting Aug. 1 Over Monkeypox

EXCERPT:

BREED: “We don’t want to be ignored by the federal government in our need. So many leaders of the LGBT community have also, weeks ago, asked for additional help and support and assistance, and this was July 20th. And now here we are, July 28, and we’re double that number at 281 cases of monkeypox and in desperate need of vaccines. And to also put that into perspective in terms of the numbers, we’ve received about 12,000 vaccines today. We really need 70,000. We sent in a letter as well asking for about 35,000, because what we want to do is we want to prevent the numbers from increasing. We have a solution in the vaccines and we want to make sure that everyone who is requesting a vaccine gets one. We have five sites identified in San Francisco and have to close many of those sites because we’ve run out of vaccines. So we’re all here today because we know the importance of this. We know the challenges of what happens in San Francisco when we put public health on the back burner. We’ve seen this happened before in history during the AIDS crisis when San Francisco was virtually left on its own, to fend for itself, to address what became a real pandemic in this country. And we used the examples of the work that we did when we came together during AIDS crisis to fight against discrimination, against the hate, to focus on public health, because this is about public health of the residents of our city. And so, by sounding the alarm, what we’re saying is, this is not going to be ignored, that this is a public health crisis, that we are in desperate need of vaccines to support the people of San Francisco.”