Biden administration prepares to lift monkeypox state of emergency

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently registering only a few new infections per day, compared with more than 400 on average daily at the peak of the outbreak. The decline also reduced initial fears that the virus would spread to a wider population, further complicating efforts to contain the spread.

The Biden administration plans to keep the White House-led Mpox response operation next year, with officials stressing that more work is needed to reduce cases and guard against future recurrence.

But now, with the average daily infection rate at the teen level, senior Biden officials are reconsidering whether the state of emergency should be maintained. Lifting the emergency status for mpox won’t have a significant impact on ongoing response efforts, people said.

Some administration officials are also viewing the potential cancellation of the Mpox emergency as a test run to eventually end the decades-long Covid emergency — a bigger challenge Biden aides expect at some point next year.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said the department has committed to notifying states 60 days prior to any termination or expiration of the mpox public health emergency.

The Biden administration first declared the smallpox outbreak a public health emergency in August amid growing criticism over its half-hearted early efforts to contain the virus. Health officials at the time struggled to track the spread of cases more than a month after mpox arrived in the US, and to scale up testing and accelerate the spread of treatments.

August 4 declaration of an emergency aimed at freeing up new resources and speed up the delivery of vaccines at what FDA Commissioner Robert Kaliff called “the critical inflection point.” Around the same time, the White House also took direct control of the response, appointing two coordinators to lead the government’s efforts.

Since then, federal and state health officials have been pushing hard to limit transmission of the virus and vaccinate risk groups. Although there are almost 30,000 cases of smallpox in the United States to date, more than in any other country, the number of new infections has steadily declined throughout the fall.

Department of Health decided to extend state of emergency for another 90 days at the beginning of November, keeping it in force until the beginning of next year.