By request, I thought I’d start a separate thread for monkey pox. The prior discussion was mixed in with the covid main thread, and you can find about a dozen prior posts there with this search.
https://www.fragiledeal.com/search?expanded=true&q=Pox%20topic%3A3655%20after%3A2022-05-01
In many ways, the poor pandemic responses we saw from our health authorities and political leaders are being replicated here as they were with covid early on, and the disease is being allowed to spread without meaningful public health measures. We have learned little it seems, and this in a situation where we already know a lot about the monkey pox virus, have vaccines for it, know how it spreads, etc.
On one hand, it is tempting to say this lax approach is due to the much lower public health threat, the lower disease severity, and mostly being spread by direct contact with obviously symptomatic people. On the other hand, the great reluctance to “stigmatize” the male gay orgies that served as super spreader events in Europe to start the outbreak and the subsequent Pride Month ones have lead to additional unmitigated transmission and suggest otherwise. This makes me think that our leadership is prioritizing woke sensibilities over sensible policy, and at least in the US, they’re working hard on that track record on main fronts.
Feel free to post anything monkey pox related here.