The View’s Sunny Hostin Confronts White House Covid Coordinator: Did Biden Admin ‘Miss an Opportunity to Get Ahead of’ Monkeypox?

The View co-host Sunny Hostin confronted White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha on Friday over whether the Biden administration “miss[ed] an opportunity to get ahead of” the monkeypox outbreak.

Hostin quoted a New York Times op-ed last week by former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who wrote that monkeypox could be “one of the worst public health failures in modern times” since, as Hostin summarized, “it could’ve been prevented and that this should have been code red when the first cases emerged.”

“Did this administration miss an opportunity to get ahead of the virus?” asked Hostin.

Jha avoided directly answering the question and defended the administration’s response to the outbreak.

It’s interesting, you know, people often compare the monkeypox response to the Covid response from a couple of years ago. And I remind people, it’s been about two-and-a-half months since we first identified the first case. What we have seen in that two-and-a-half months is hundreds of thousands of vaccines out, testing widespread and available.

We’re doing everything at this point possible to make this easier and easier. Dr. Gottlieb is absolutely right. We have got to contain this virus. We’ve got to eliminate this virus from the country. I believe we can, and we’re going to do it with the tools we have: Testing, treatments and vaccines.

Watch above, via ABC.