Video, Audio, & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Updates New Yorkers on State's Response to Monkeypox Outbreak

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul updated New Yorkers on the State's response to the monkeypox outbreak.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PRESENTATION SLIDES from the event are available here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

The monkeypox outbreak. As you know, we announced a Declaration of Emergency, and here's why. We are seeing higher cases, you can see them across the State, about 1,617, growing quickly. And we'll be talking about our vaccination allocation as well. We have 170,000 to date, making sure that we are receiving our fair share. As I mentioned before, this is a conversation I've had with the White House. They originally were allocating based on population. We are not the most populated state, but we are the state with the highest number of cases. So we wanted them to shift how the other cases are going, even though there's a limited supply globally, so we are working around the clock to do that, as well as a public education campaign to really talk about the vulnerable communities. Let's get this out there, we are not shying away from this. Dr. Mary Bassett has been doing an incredible job, just speaking truth and telling people what behaviors are at risk, and being really smart about this.

But as we said before, about one out of four cases in this country are in New York State and with a high concentration in New York City. So, the reason we declared a Declaration of Emergency, it allows us to respond more quickly. What does that look like? That means when we do have more of a supply of vaccines, which we are anxious to get our hands on. We can have more people allocate them other than just physicians. That allows us to have EMTs and pharmacists and others in the healthcare system, midwives, people who can help administer them. So when we get under a crunch situation, you want to have more people who are eligible to do this. We needed the Declaration to do this. Also we want the providers to send us the vaccine data information, which they weren't required to do before.

So, working with the White House around the clock, as well as Dr. Jha, who we are in regular communication with, as well as other federal officials. We are glad to see that the Administration is stepping up. We also have Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, is from New York City. He's on the White House Panel. So he is our direct point of contact to make sure we get our share. So we talked about the fact that we'd be soon getting 760,000 more doses, more vaccines. The federal government will be getting that many more, and 110,000 are coming to New York State, 80,000 of which we are going to New York City. You can see our allocations thus far, our different tranches. Our last allocation, we are waiting to get those out to add to the numbers in New York City as well. New York City gets them directly from the federal government, but in our Phase Three, we've allocated over 16,000 statewide. We are going to be doing about another 12,000 more and I'm allocating additional 4,000 to the City on top of what they're getting from the federal government. So we are looking at the disease burden, where it's most concentrated and we are being really smart about that. So we are confronting, this outbreak with the urgency that it requires, our full-on attention and trying to protect the communities and getting the vaccines out there.