LGBTQIA+ Caucus Members In BK Want To Close Monkeypox Vax Equity Gap

BROOKLYN, NY — The city is falling short on distributing the monkeypox vaccine, especially among queer minorities, a prominent Crown Heights Council Member charged this week.

Crystal Hudson, co-chair of the Council's LGBTQIA+ Caucus, plans to join her colleagues in introducing bills to stop the spread of the virus.

The bills also aim to focus on people of color in the LGBT communities, who have long been ignored in past inaction, she said.

“This City has a record of doing too little, too late when it comes to curbing infectious diseases, and the communities who suffer most from our inaction are poor and low-income communities, marginalized communities, and communities of color,” Hudson said in a statement.

“Now, despite navigating the COVID-19 pandemic — from deploying mass testing sites and contact tracing procedures to guaranteeing comprehensive outreach and equal access to vaccines — we have failed, as a city, to apply the lessons we’ve learned over the last few years to our handling of the monkeypox outbreak.”

The first bill in the legislative package would require the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to create a plan to stop the spread of monkeypox, develop education and an outreach campaign about the outbreak and a proposal to ensure the communities most at risk of contracting the virus have sufficient access to vaccines, according to the LGBTQIA+ Caucus.

The outreach would include places like shelters and jails, the caucus added

Mostly cisgender white men have had access to the vaccine, despite the virus impacting minority queer members the most, the Caucus reported.

The second requirement would have the city Department of Health create a permanent vaccine portal that allows New Yorkers to schedule vaccine appointments for infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and monkeypox, according to the bill.

The bill is a response to the technical glitches in the city’s appointment portal and a forced switch in healthcare providers after reports surfaced that mostly white gay men were most of the recipients of the vaccine.

“The legislation introduced in this package seeks to remedy the systemic shortcomings that have hindered our ability to respond to this public health emergency effectively and efficiently,” Hudson said. “These bills make clear that a robust set of procedures are paramount to the success of future responses and reaffirm our commitment to pursue evidence-based solutions while not sacrificing the inclusivity, sensitivity, and compassion we work so hard to build in our communities.”

Hudson said it is vital that the bills are passed with urgency to help address the public health emergency and to prevent future ones by using science, data, compassion, understanding and care.

Bed-Stuy Councilman Chi Ossé is the sponsor of the second bill, which would require the health department to publish up-to-date information on its website about monkeypox vaccinations and cases, including demographic data on individuals vaccinated.

“New York City has an opportunity to effectively tackle this monkeypox outbreak, but the window is quickly closing,” Ossé said in a statement. “We must learn from our 2 ½ painful years dealing with Covid-19 — lessons in both epidemiology and equity — to get ahead of this crisis.”

It is essential that the Council pass the bills swiftly, added Ossé.

“The City can arm itself with the necessary tools to win this fight with minimal harm, before it’s too late,” he added.

The LGBTQIA+ Caucus is also introducing a resolution sponsored by Hudson that calls upon the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to increase the number of monkeypox vaccines available in New York City.

Roughly a quarter of all monkeypox cases are in the Empire State, with the highest infection rate in the Big Apple, but the city has received only 12 percent of vaccines from the federal government, resulting in health department appointments being fully booked by the time the doses arrived in New York.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, told Patch in an email that the city has prioritized urgency from the beginning of the outbreak, as well as getting shots in the arm and equity.

“We talk a lot about these large vaccination sites, similar to what we did for Covid, mass vaccination sites, but what's talked about less are the thousands of doses that we're reserving for community-based organizations that serve men who have sex with men, that serve communities of color, that serve the LGBTQ community that were reserving appointments for them, in order to ensure that equity is built into this approach,” Vasan said.

“It's one of the lessons we learned from Covid. We and many places across the country got vaccines into arms as quickly as possible, but then we were left kind of working on equity for the weeks and months thereafter … It's very hard to ensure equity in an environment of deeply constrained supply. But I'm optimistic we will see the results in the coming weeks ahead.”

Beverly Tillery, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, said there is bias in the healthcare system.

“As we know from case data, LGBTQ and HIV-affected community members, particularly our Black, Brown and Indigenous queer and trans siblings, are significantly affected by this resurgence of the monkeypox virus, just as they continue to be disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Tillery said in a statement. “This is connected to historical and current systemic, bias-driven failures in healthcare that devalue their lives, now affecting the distribution of a much-needed vaccine to stop the spread of this preventable illness.”

As of Wednesday, there were 10,392 cases nationwide and 2,132 cases throughout New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Demographic data from New York depicts that people 30 to 34 make up 24 percent of the cases; 97 percent of cases are among men; 70 percent of cases are lesbian or gay individuals; 51 percent of cases are among Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islanders, 34 percent are among white people, and the remaining 14 percent have an unknown or missing background information or reported were reported as other, according to the state Department of Health on Wednesday.