By Olivia Borgula

When junior computer science major Akshay Bhandari learned he was eligible to receive the monkeypox vaccine last summer, he made an appointment as soon as possible. 

Spots went quick. Bhandari — who was working in New York at the time — navigated appointment sign-ups during a surge of monkeypox cases. 

In Maryland, however, vaccine eligibility was limited to individuals who had been exposed to the disease two weeks prior.

But as of Sept. 19, this eligibility expanded to anyone at high risk of monkeypox infection, according to a news release from the Maryland Department of Public Health. 

High risk individuals include people with multiple sexual partners and anyone whose sexual partner has been exposed to the disease in the last two weeks.

Kimberly Bollache, a vice president and global regulatory portfolio lead in the vaccines category at Pfizer, said COVID-19 has forever altered the way vaccines are developed and released, which includes the monkeypox vaccine rollout.

“We went from drug development that took 10 to 12 years to less than a year,” she said. “We’ve sort of proven that things don’t have to take this long, that we can generate evidence very, very quickly, and that we can be much more nimble.”

JYNNEOS and ACAM2000 are the two licensed monkeypox vaccines. JYNNEOS is the primary vaccine, given as a two-dose injection spread 28 days apart. ACAM2000 is a single-dose smallpox vaccine approved to prevent monkeypox. 

Because the supply of these vaccines are limited, injections can be administered intradermally. This means a smaller volume of vaccine is injected shallower into the skin, allowing five times as many injections to come out of one single-dose vial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration determined this administration is safe, equally effective and has been used for other vaccines during shortages. 

This method can produce skin redness after injection. For Bhandari, that was the case.

“I had no reaction to the first [dose]. But when I got my second one, honestly, by the night, that area of my skin had blown up,” he said. “It looked like a mosquito bite, but like, three, four times the normal size.” 

Joy Anyanwu, a junior sociology major, also received the monkeypox vaccine. They said the site of injection grew itchy and swelled to the size of an egg, leaving them with scarring. 

“That kind of made me upset,” they said. “Just how intensely it scarred, but I got the second dose last week … it hasn’t itched at all, it hasn’t swollen at all and it’s not scarring nearly as bad otherwise.”

Anyanwu said misinformation was minimized by the queer community’s response and immediate action to ensure health accountability. 

“Pandemic has been such a theme within queer history,” they said. “People are comparing [monkeypox] to AIDS rhetoric in regards to gay men and trans men [and] their susceptibility towards the disease, and how that language may be harmful, but this was a good example of  how people flip that and they’re like, okay, if I’m more susceptible, and the government has given me resources to not be harmed by this, I’m gonna take them.”

Bollache said the peak of monkeypox cases and the release of preventative vaccines also propelled misinformation, Bollache said.

“With social media and with the internet, it’s really really hard to essentially dispel a lot of the myths out there,” she said. “I think that both companies and the regulators need to do a better job of providing awareness about what the real risks are versus the benefits.”

Featured Image: The University Health Center on Oct. 5, 2022 in College Park, Maryland. Photo by Olivia Borgula.