The Future of Monkeypox
The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.
About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
