National
Becerra gets defensive over Biden administration’s approach to monkeypox
HHS sec’y vaguely blames localities and ‘communities at risk’
The Biden administration’s top health official got defensive on Thursday in response to questions about its response to monkeypox, suggesting localities and “communities at risk” weren’t doing enough on prevention efforts and asserting the federal government has “done our homework” in addressing the outbreak.
Secretary of Health & Human Services Xavier Becerra made the comments during a conference call with reporters intended to highlight the federal procurement of an additional 786,000 JYNNEOS vaccines from Bavarian Nordic, which are designed to protect against smallpox and monkeypox, amid concerns over a lack of supply causing localities to restrict access to the shots.
When reporters started asking questions about whether the U.S. government could eliminate monkeypox, or simply get ahead of it and whether the disease would become endemic in the United States, Becerra became defensive and downplayed concerns about vaccine availability.
“I almost want to turn that question back at you…and ask you how many vaccines do you think we need at this stage?” Becerra said. “Now there are 330 million Americans. We could try to vaccinate all 330 million but as we’ve seen with COVID, which is far deadlier. There’s not a person who’s died from monkeypox. We’ve lost over a million people from COVID. We still haven’t seen every American get vaccinated with a vaccine that has proven itself to be effective to keep people alive.”
Although challenges have persisted in getting Americans to take now widely available COVID vaccines, the problem with the monkeypox vaccine is supply not meeting demand. The D.C. government announced it would temporarily discontinue a two-shot strategy and offer one shot, which is below the recommended federal guidelines, unless a patient is considered high risk. D.C. Health officials have said the first dose is effective for six months and they anticipate having enough vaccine within that time frame to administer the second doses. Critics have said the Biden administration has not sufficiently ramped up efforts to make vaccines widely available for a disease that has been around since the 1950s.
Meanwhile, the number of cases of monkeypox in the United States, which have occurred almost entirely among men who have sex with men, has reached 3,591. The number of cases is now the highest anywhere in the world.
“So on monkeypox, there are so far less than 5,000 cases reported,” Becerra continued. “So we’ve already made available to jurisdictions throughout the country more than 330,000 vaccines and today we’re announcing that another 786,000 are available. How many more vaccines would you say we need today?”
That’s when Becerra appeared to shift blame over criticism to the government response to localities and “communities at risk,” suggesting they weren’t doing enough to prevent monkeypox. Although Becerra didn’t elaborate exactly on what he meant by prevention for monkeypox, nor “communities at risk,” he compared such efforts to social distancing and masks during the coronavirus pandemic.
“If the response is we’re not going to expect any type of prevention work by the communities at risk, by the state and local officials, then chances are we’re going to have to go to the really high numbers of vaccines,” Becerra said. “But if everyone does their work, and remember containing the virus requires a lot of preventative work — as you know we did masks, that’s why we did social distancing with COVID — we know what we need to do pretty well on monkeypox.”
Becerra went on to promote the federal government’s efforts on monkeypox as rising to the moment, continuing to say state and local officials were responsible for not getting vaccines to populations in need.
“And so to the question: Can we not only stay ahead of this virus, but end this outbreak? Absolutely,” Becerra said. “And we believe that we have done everything we can at the federal level to work with our state and local partners and communities affected to make sure we can stay ahead of this and end this outbreak, but everybody’s got to take the oar and row. Everybody’s got to do their part. We don’t control, as you can see from our lack of data that we’ve gotten from jurisdictions, what they’re doing with their vaccines. We don’t have the authority to tell them what to do. We need them to work with us. And so, I would say that if you’re asking students in the classroom who did their homework, I will raise my hand and say that at HHS, we’ve done our homework.”
Lindsay Dawson, associate director of HIV Policy and director of LGBTQ Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Washington Blade in response to Becerra’s comments the secretary has a point about the role of localities, but said current problems are at least partly attributed to “barriers at the federal level.”
“Responding to infectious disease outbreaks, including monkeypox, often requires a joint federal and state or local response,” Dawson said. “It is certainly true that local governments have a significant role to play in curbing the current outbreak and that the different decisions they make will likely foreshadow their success to some degree. That said, many of the primary tools to address the monkeypox outbreak, particularly vaccination and treatment, remain limited to date due, at least in part, to barriers at the federal level. Limited access to these tools could challenge local communities in mounting a comprehensive response in the immediate term.”
National
LGBTQ asylum seeker ‘forcibly removed’ from US, sent to El Salvador
Immigrant Defenders Law Center represents Venezuelan national
An immigrant rights group that represents an LGBTQ asylum seeker from Venezuela says the Trump-Vance administration on March 15 “forcibly removed” him from the U.S. and sent him to El Salvador.
Immigrant Defenders Law Center Litigation and Advocacy Director Alvaro M. Huerta during a telephone interview with the Washington Blade on Tuesday said officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection alleged his organization’s client was a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based gang, because of his tattoos and no other information.
“It’s very flimsy,” said Huerta. “These are the types of tattoos that any artist in New York City or Los Angeles would have. It’s nothing that makes him a gang member.”
The White House on Feb. 20 designated Tren de Aragua an “international terrorist organization.”
President Donald Trump on March 15 invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Associated Press notes allows the U.S. to deport “noncitizens without any legal recourse.”
“I proclaim that all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA (Tren de Aragua), are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies,” said Trump in a proclamation that announced his invocation of the 18th century law.
The asylum seeker — who the Immigrant Defenders Law Center has not identified by name because he is “in danger” — is among the hundreds of Venezuelans who the U.S. sent to El Salvador on March 15.
Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia temporarily blocked the deportations. The AP notes the flights were already in the air when Boasberg issued his ruling.
Huerta said U.S. officials on Monday confirmed the asylum seeker is “indeed in El Salvador.” He told the Blade it remains unclear whether the asylum seeker is in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security prison known by the Spanish acronym CECOT.
‘We couldn’t find him’
Huerta said the Immigrant Defenders Law Center client fled Venezuela and asked for asylum in the U.S.
The asylum seeker, according to Huerta, passed a “credible fear interview” that determines whether an asylum claim is valid. Huerta said U.S. officials detained the asylum seeker last year when he returned to the country from the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
Huerta told the Blade the asylum seeker was supposed to appear before an immigration judge on March 13.
“We couldn’t find him,” said Huerta.
He noted speculation over whether Trump was about to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center “started getting concerned that maybe he was caught up in this situation.”
“He’s an LGBT individual who is an artist in Venezuela,” said Huerta.
Neither ICE nor CBP have responded to the Blade’s request for comment.
Huerta said it is “hard to say” whether the asylum seeker has any legal recourse.
“He still has an ongoing case in immigration court here,” said Huerta, noting the asylum seeker’s attorney was in court on Monday, and has another hearing in two weeks. “Presumably they should have to allow him to appear, at least virtually, for court because he still has these cases.”
Huerta noted the U.S. since Trump took office has deported hundreds of migrants to Panama; officials in the Central American country have released dozens of them from detention. Migrants sent to the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have returned to detention facilities in the U.S.
“Something where the government, kind of unliterally, can just say that someone is a gang member based on tattoos, without any offer of proof, without having to go to court to say that and then take them externally to what effectively a prison state (El Salvador), it certainly is completely just different than what we’ve seen,” Huerta told the Blade.
Huerta also spoke about the Trump-Vance administration’s overall immigration policy.
“The Trump administration knows exactly what they’re doing when it comes to scapegoating immigrants, scapegoating asylees,” he said. “They have a population that, in many ways, is politically powerless, but in many other ways, is politically powerful because they have other folks standing behind them as well, but they’re an easy punching bag.”
“They can use this specter of we’re just deporting criminals, even though they’re the ones who are saying that they’re criminal, they’re not necessarily proving that,” added Huerta. “They feel like they can really take that fight and run with it, and they’re testing the bounds of what they can get away with inside and outside of the courtroom.”
National
Kennedy Center official slams Harvey Fierstein’s ban claim as ‘total lie’
Grenell invites iconic gay actor to perform ‘Hairspray’
Richard Grenell, who was appointed president and interim executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by President Trump, pushed back against Harvey Fierstein’s claim of being banned from the Kennedy Center, calling it “a total lie” in a new X post.
On Wednesday, gay icon and Tony Award-winning actor Harvey Fierstein posted on Instagram, claiming to have been “banned from THE KENNEDY CENTER.” In the post, Fierstein shared a picture of himself walking in the 1979 Christopher Street Liberation Day parade alongside LGBTQ rights activist Marsha P. Johnson. In the caption, he alleged that Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was the reason for his ban, calling it an attack on free speech and a threat to democracy.
The Blade emailed the Kennedy Center’s public relations team, seeking confirmation of Fierstein’s claim and an official statement from the cultural center. More than an hour later, in a separate email that did not directly address the original request, Brendan Padgett, the Kennedy Center’s director of Public Relations, responded with a link to a post on his boss Grenell’s X account.
“Making sure you saw this,” Padgett’s email read, followed by a link to Grenell’s post.
“Hey, @HarveyFierstein This is a total lie,” Grenell wrote in the post. “Whoever told you this (because you obviously didn’t do your own research) should be fired from your team for purposefully making you look foolish.”
Grenell’s post, uploaded the morning after Fierstein’s initial claim, included screenshots of Fierstein’s Instagram post. Grenell went on to assert that, like Fierstein, he had been a fighter “for equality for decades,” citing his position as the first openly gay member of a U.S. president’s Cabinet as proof. (Grenell was never confirmed by the Senate; the first openly gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet official is Pete Buttigieg, former Secretary of Transportation.)
“You aren’t banned,” Grenell continued. “In fact, come do Hairspray or La Cage here at the Kennedy Center. This is your personal invite. Let’s meet—if, however, you can handle diverse opinions and want to be inclusive of everyone, that is.”
The Washington Blade reached out to both Harvey Fierstein and Brendan Padgett for comment on the ongoing situation. Padgett responded, stating, “No comment aside from the Kennedy Center President’s post.” Fierstein has yet to respond.
National
Trump administration considering closing HIV prevention agency: reports
Sources say funding cuts possible for CDC
The Department of Health and Human Services is considering closing the HIV Prevention Division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and transferring some of its programs to a different agency, according to a report by the New York Times.
The Times and Politico cited government sources who spoke on condition of not being identified as saying plans under consideration from the administration also call for possible funding cuts in the domestic HIV prevention program following funding cuts already put in place for foreign U.S. HIV programs.
“It’s not 100 percent going to happen, but 100 percent being discussed,” the Times quoted one of the sources as saying.
News of the possible shutdown of the HIV Prevention Division and possible cuts in HIV prevention funds prompted 13 of the nation’s leading LGBTQ, HIV, and health organizations to release a joint statement on March19 condemning what they said could result in a “devastating effect” on the nation’s progress in fighting AIDS.
Among the organizations signing on to the joint statement were D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Health and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, which opposes funding cuts or curtailment in domestic AIDS programs, points out in a separate statement that it was President Trump during his first term in office who put in place the HIV Epidemic Initiative, which calls for ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by 2030.
That initiative, which Trump announced in his 2019 State of the Union address, is credited with having reduced new HIV infections nationwide by 30 percent in adolescents and young adults, and by about 10 percent in most other groups, according to the Times report on possible plans to scale back the program.
In a statement released to Politico, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said, “HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking a careful look at all divisions to see where there is overlap that could be streamlined to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure the federal government.”
“No final decision on streamlining CDC’s HIV Prevention Division has been made,” Nixon said in his statement.
“An effort to defund HIV prevention by this administration would set us back decades, cost innocent people their lives and cost taxpayers millions,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, in a March 19 statement.
“The LGBTQ+ community still carries the scars of the government negligence and mass death of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” Robinson said. “We should be doubling down on our investment to end the HIV epidemic once and for all, not regressing to the days of funeral services and a virus running rampant,” she said.
“We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s reckless moves to defund and de-prioritize HIV prevention,” the statement released by the 13 organizations says. “These abrupt and incomprehensible possible cuts threaten to reverse decades of progress, exposing our nation to a resurgence of a preventable disease with devastating and avoidable human and financial costs,” the statement says.
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LGBTQ asylum seeker ‘forcibly removed’ from US, sent to El Salvador
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