America Should Have Been Able to Handle Monkeypox

When the monkeypox outbreak was first detected in the United States, it seemed, as far as infectious-disease epidemics go, like one this country should be able to handle. Tests and antivirals for the virus already existed; the government had stockpiled vaccines. Unlike SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox was a known entity, a relative softball on the pathogenic field. It wasn’t hypertransmissible, moving mainly through intimate contact during the disease’s symptomatic phase; previous epidemics had, with few interventions, rather quickly burned themselves out. The playbook was clear: Marshal U.S. resources and ensure they go to those most at risk, send aid abroad, and knock it out of the park. “If there was one virus that would lend itself to containment,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, a virologist and infectious-disease physician at Emory University, this should have been it.

Two months later, global counts have crested above 21,000 confirmed cases, nearly a of which are in the United States, which keeping track. Infections, , have been documented in 46 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico; New York State and San Francisco have , as , on a global