evidence: But bizarrely, even though it owns most of the current stock, the US hasn’t secured a consistent supply of usable vaccines. The country has been stockpiling doses for years—to protect against smallpox, which it also works against, in the event of a bioterror attack—and has bought close to 30 million over the past two decades. However, the vast majority of the usable doses it ordered in the past expired sitting in freezers and were never replaced, despite the US having many more on order. (The country owns the equivalent of about 16.5 million doses in bulk form, Bavarian Nordic has said, and had been keeping a lot of it on ice while a method of freeze-drying the vaccine was being developed.) When the monkeypox outbreak hit the US, it had just 2,400 doses that were usable. Now, bureaucratic fumblings on the part of the US government have made it difficult for the country to get its hands on more usable doses to replenish its stocks, even though it owns most of the bulk that’s already been made. In 2020, the US ordered 1.4 million usable doses of the vaccine from Bavarian Nordic, yet this June—when the monkeypox outbreak was beginning to proliferate across the country and the order was still outstanding—US authorities still dillydallied before requesting the company start fulfilling that request by shipping over some 370,000 doses sitting ready in Denmark.