The Bittersweet Defeat Of Monkeypox
Things today look very different, at least for now. By mid-December, mpox, as the World Health Organization has now renamed it, had appeared in 110 countries, but the spread had dramatically slowed. The US, which had recorded 29,740 cases as of December 21—more than a third of the global total—was registering barely a handful each day. While one reason is that access to vaccines and testing improved, and another is that mpox is inherently much harder to transmit than Covid, the biggest, most agree, is that the people most at risk took their protection into their own hands in those crucial early weeks when the authorities were flailing....