President Biden: United States is exploring monkeypox vaccines, says ‘everybody should be concerned’

President Biden said Sunday that the United States is looking into what vaccines might be available to protect people against monkeypox.

“Everybody should be concerned about [it],” Biden said in South Korea, while speaking with a group of reporters before he boarded Air Force One for Japan. “We’re working on it hard to figure out what we do and what vaccine, if any, might be available for it,” Biden added.

Biden said the recent spread of monkeypox infections — identified by the World Health Organization in at least 12 countries where the relatively rare disease is not endemic — could be “consequential” if it continues.

Health advisers “haven’t told me the level of exposure yet, but it is something that everybody should be concerned about,” Biden said. “It is a concern in that if it were to spread, it would be consequential.”

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the United States has vaccines available to treat a potential monkeypox outbreak and that Biden has been briefed on the case tracks domestically and abroad. “He’s being apprised of this on a very regular basis,” Sullivan said, briefing journalists Sunday on Air Force One after departing South Korea.

“This is not a new virus to us. We’ve known about this virus for decades,” Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

“This is a virus we understand. We have vaccines against it. We have treatments against it … It’s not as contagious as covid. So I am confident we’re going be able to keep our arms around it.”

At this point, the general risk to the public from monkeypox is considered “very, very low,” Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, previously told The Washington Post.

While there are at least 80 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide and another 50 suspected cases, the U.S. has only confirmed a pair of cases after a man in Massachusetts was diagnosed with the disease. Another man in New York City also tested positive for monkeypox.