SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- Activists protested outside of San Francisco’s federal building Monday, demanding more action against monkeypox as cases continue to climb.
Protestors and activists said their message is simple. They want more testing, more treatment and more vaccines. ”It's all homophobia all over again. It's AIDS 2.0 and it's really unfortunate,” said Erik Leve.
Leve joined Monday’s protest outside of the San Francisco federal building, saying not enough is being done to protect his community from monkeypox.
“The lack of access, the lack of treatments, the last of ready availability to vaccines and the fact that the community isn't being acknowledged. This is a flashback to 40 years ago when our community was ignored, and that time thousands of people got infected and thousands of people died but the only difference this time is nobody's going to die,” said Paul Aguilar, the chair of the HIV caucus of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.
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Aguilar helped organize this event, calling on more from the secretary of Health and Human Services. While the recent federal and state emergency declarations are designed to reduce red tape barriers, Aguilar says the response is too slow.
“It's the lack of vaccine. Right now, one of the organizations, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation has a 10,000-person waiting list. That's crazy. I don't think we're going to be able to prevent monkeypox from becoming an endemic in the United States,” said Aguilar.
In addition to testing, activists said there needs to be larger access to treatment, something Michael Torra learned the hard way.
“As the condition progressed probably by the start of the second week it started to get excruciatingly painful, so for like five or six days, I was experiencing a lot of pain. I was extremely frustrated that there was basically no information out there in terms of what to do to treat that pain,” Torra said.
Torra and other organizers hope to do away with the bureaucratic hurdles of accessing TPOXX, a drug that's currently not FDA-approved for monkeypox treatment but is approved to treat smallpox.
Local and state officials said this is something they are working on and Senator Scott Wiener is holding a select committee hearing on monkeypox Tuesday to address these issues. The FDA is also looking into a new vaccine approach that could stretch supplies.
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