Monkeypox was supposed to be different, because it is much harder to transmit, treatments and vaccines were already available, much was known about a virus first described in 1958 and so many lessons were supposedly learned from COVID-19.
The story of monkeypox feels to experts frustratingly like a replay of the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
"It's deja vu all over again," said Lawrence Gostin, a university professor and global health law expert at Georgetown University in Washington."We're really flying in the dark." "It has been challenging to watch what has happened over the last 2½ months," said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency room physician and academic dean of Brown University's School of Public Health in Rhode Island."I am flummoxed by why we are where we are today."
Frieden said he remembers traveling to Africa's Democratic Republic of the Congo when he was CDC director in the early 2010s and hearing from officials who were worried that monkeypox and other infectious diseases eventually would spread across the globe. But there were no resources to combat those diseases, he said.
Although striking first in the gay community, in the United States HIV spread to the unhoused, sex workers and other marginalized people."It's not too far of a leap to say it's going to follow the contours of our social geography again, like it did for HIV," he said. Although many people faulted the Trump administration for responding too slowly to COVID-19, it did launch Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development of vaccines in record time.
Instead, officials have relied on Jynneos, a vaccine that seems to work well with few problems, though it has never been tried before during an actual monkeypox outbreak. Similarly, an antiviral treatment called TPOXX that appears to work well against monkeypox has been tied up in bureaucracy and is difficult for patients to access, although the government has begun removing the red tape.
The tools for fighting monkeypox are there, Gonsalves said. But instead of getting them to the public immediately, "we kept them in the garage," he said."That's the most depressing thing about all of this."What can be done about monkeypox in the US?National Monkeypox Response Team
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