The Biden administration has declared the Monkeypox outbreak in the United States a public health emergency.

The news comes just days after the administration appointed Robert Fenton and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis to oversee the White House's response to the outbreak.

Fenton, who helped lead FEMA's COVID-19 mass vaccination campaign as its acting administrator, said that the new designation will “allow us to explore additional strategies to get vaccines and treatments more quickly out in the affected communities, and it will allow us to get more data from jurisdictions so we can effectively track the suffering.”

Secretary of Health & Human Services Xavier Becerra told reporters on Thursday that the United States had an estimated 6,600 cases of Monkeypox. He added that the US now has the capacity to process up to 60,000 Monkeypox tests per week.

Several states, including New York and California, have already declared the outbreak an emergency.

Monkeypox has hit the LGBTQ community the hardest. According to The New York Times, over 95 percent of cases in the United States are among men who have sex with men. While the virus appears to be spreading mostly through sexual activity, close contact with an infected person – or touching items such as clothing or bedding that previously contacted an accompanying rash – is all that is needed to pass on the virus. The CDC has also said that the Monkeypox virus can be spread through respiratory droplets.

The Times reported that the government does not have the vaccine doses needed to get the outbreak under control, writing that the US has “less than a third of the 3.5 million [doses] that health officials now estimate are needed to fight the outbreak.” The US will receive another half a million doses in October and 5.5 million next year.