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Torrian Baskerville, director of HIV & Health Equity at the Human Rights Campaign, tells The Advocate how groups are preparing for a potential outbreak of the new mpox strain.
As a new mpox strain spreads, advocates are working to ensure that governments don't make the same mistakes they did in the face of other pandemics.
The Clade I mpox strain recently emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has been spreading to neighboring African countries. The World Health Organization declared the latest mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, outbreak as a global health emergency earlier this month. While there have not yet been any cases detected in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other groups are monitoring this current surge.
"We are still figuring out what that looks like compared to the one that we experienced two years ago," Torrian Baskerville, director of HIV & Health Equity at the Human Rights Campaign, told The Advocate. "What we do know, however, is that it is more severe than the one that we experienced a couple years ago and is leading us to a lot more deaths, particularly in in children."
Related: World Health Organization again declares mpox a global health emergency amid rising case threat
The HRC and other organizations are currently "focusing on vaccination" efforts, as well as "providing a lot of education" to the communities that are particularly vulnerable to the virus. Baskerville said his group is "working with the federal government, particularly the CDC, around ensuring that the response to the public health emergency is equitable, both in access to information, but also the access to vaccinations."
"Two years ago, when we saw the response from the federal government as well as health departments on the state level, we saw that there was a disproportionate impact of access to information around vaccination for Black and Latine communities," he said. "We saw that Black and Latine communities were impacted disproportionately, but we didn't see that same level of response with folks getting vaccinated."
"We really took the approach to work with the CDC and health departments to think about one, how are they providing information to community, but then also how we incorporate the voices of community in its response and ensure that LGBTQ folks, particularly Black and Latine folks, are at the center of the response," Baskerville added.
One thing the HRC encourages from governments is funding, as "community based organizations, community health centers, and these other health systems that community really utilize often are already overburdened and under-resourced." Beyond resources, Baskerville emphasized that officials' rhetoric goes a long way.
"One of the things that we challenged the federal government with a couple years ago was the language in which they were utilizing to describe what was happening, ensuring that when we are disseminating information, that we're not doing so in a shameful, stigmatizing way," he explained.
Still, this hasn't stopped conservative politicians in particular from making "inappropriate connections" between a primarily sexually transmitted disease and the LGBTQ+ community. Baskerville noted that many "were literally conveying a message that was steeped in homophobia, or perpetuating stigma against the LGBTQ community."
While officials must make efforts to avoid vilifying a group, Baskerville said that they must also avoid vilifying sexual activities. He highlighted the importance of a "sex-positive" attitude that does not shame people for their choices.
"When we're thinking about information, it's incumbent upon us to ensure that we're disseminating it in a way that is sex positive and that is not attempting to restrict folks' ability to engage in whatever behaviors that they deem necessary and important for their lives," he said.
However, people still have an individual responsibility to take care of their own health. Baskerville said he "would encourage people to analyze where they are in their life, what behaviors they can potentially adjust."
"It's important that folks educate themselves on the ways in which you can be exposed to mpox, what ways you can prevent contraction," Baskerville said. "The most important piece of that is vaccination, and ensuring that you are getting vaccinated and that you get two shots. It's important to be fully vaccinated and fully vaccinated means you're getting two shots two weeks apart from each other, which is the standard currently."
The CDC recommends that those at higher risk get vaccinated, including gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, as well as transgender or nonbinary people. The two-doses of the Jynneos vaccine is crucial for effectively preventing the spread of mpox regardless of the strain, according to the organization, and contraction can be prevented by avoiding close skin-to-skin contact with individuals showing symptoms of the virus.
Still, Baskerville maintained that this can not make up for instances in which information or vaccinations do not reach communities, nor can it influence those who lack trust in the institutions around them.
"We also can't dismiss that in the American health system, there is a mistrust particularly within Black and Latine communities," Baskerville explained. "Part of addressing that is just ensuring that the information that we are providing is accurate. Ensuring that when we're telling folks that these are the places that they can go to get vaccinated, they are actually going to those places and getting the vaccine, and not being turned away."
To Baskerville, these trends show "some similarities" between the current response to mpox and the public response to the HIV pandemic as it devastated communities in the 1980s, particularly in the "stigma" that has emerged around the viruses.
"We saw this when creating stigma around the HIV epidemic. The way in which officials were speaking about the virus in connection to the impact of it within certain communities, particularly LGBTQ," he continued. "For many years, the federal government wasn't talking about it, but when they did talk about it, it was really steeped in homophobia and wasn't productive to getting folks engaged in services to help maintain healthiness for themselves."
Baskerville believes governments have stepped up recently by "centering community in the response" and using the HIV pandemic as an example, though there is still much more to be done in the event of an outbreak in the U.S.
"We have to always remember equity, and that means covering those communities to ensure that they aren't continuously bearing the brunt of public health emergencies or epidemics the way that we continuously see," Baskerville said. "And that means addressing structural and systemic racism and homophobia, and also ensuring that these communities and the healthcare systems who they engage with often are getting the resources that they need."
