Washington – US health authorities hope that a new method of administering the monkeypox vaccine, which has received an emergency authorization this Tuesday from the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA), will quintuple the amount of vaccines available in the country.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” said the coordinator of the White House response team against the disease, Robert Fenton, during a press conference to explain the plan.

The new method consists of the intradermal administration of two doses of the vaccine that, together, use only a fifth of the total amount of compound that is normally used to vaccinate patients.

The traditional route of administration, subcutaneous, which also requires two doses, will continue to be used for minors, in part because administration intradermally (between the layers of the skin, rather than through the skin) is somewhat more complicated in children.

Health officials say that the immune response is similar, regardless of the method of administration of the vaccine.

They also remember that this method of immunization is not new, and that it has been used in the past to vaccinate against smallpox.

Federal authorities estimate that, thanks to this formula, the number of vaccines made available to states will increase to 2.2 million (the initial number, announced two weeks ago, was 1.1 million, but about half have already been delivered for subcutaneous use).

The US Secretary of Health, Xavier Becerra, declared a national health emergency last week due to the recent outbreak of monkeypox in the US, after the Administration of the president, Joe Biden, received criticism for its slowness in to cope with the unprecedented rise in infections.

The United States has registered, to date, almost 9,000 infections of the disease, which usually causes fever and rashes, usually in the genital or anal area.

The country has not registered any deaths so far.

The disease was endemic in some African countries but was rarely detected in the West until a few months ago, when cases began to be reported in Europe and America.

The appearance of the disease in new territories, and the speed of new infections, led the World Health Organization to declare a health emergency, its maximum alert level, on July 23.

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