The U.S. may be losing the fight against monkeypox, scientists say | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. may be losing the fight against monkeypox, scientists say

nytimes.com

63 pointsjasonhansel101 comments

This article seems to want to paint the government as at fault for the spread of the disease. Then this line appears further down:

"In San Francisco, B, a 43-year-old medical writer who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons, found himself shivering uncontrollably with a high fever on June 14, eight days after he had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse in Chicago"

At this point in time Monkey Pox is a known disease and the fact that it is highly transmissible via male on male sex is a known transmission vector. If people insist on engaging in high risk sex with multiple partners while a communicable disease is running rampant, at what point does it become their responsibility? HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior.

I see no reason why if people just eased up on the high risk sex with multiple partners for a couple of months that this disease would not return to dormancy. Virtually all reported cases have been traced to this transmission vector.

There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.

> HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior.

UK technical briefing (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbrea...):

> Where known, more than half had history of STI in the last year (54%, 233 out of 445); 30% (123) were living with HIV; 16% (67 out of 445) had one or no sexual partners, and 31% (134) had 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months.

Similar stats in Europe - 40% HIV positive where known. (https://monkeypoxreport.ecdc.europa.eu/)

not to mention not a single death in the USA (at least yet) - I really don't want the government over reacting every time a virus pops up; there is value in waiting to see how things play out first.

Seems like the media is trying really hard to hype this one now that Covid story is getting stale.

>there is value in waiting to see how things play out first

No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad.

It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.

The comparison to HIV is apt. At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease. Officials acted as though everyone was equally at risk of contracting it. That was incorrect, and pretending otherwise helped noone.

>At its peak, in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone was taught to dread this disease

And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?

> and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?

I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream.

In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner.

Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex

Adding to this over 40% of South African women are raped over the course of their lives. This also results in tearing.

Yeah remember that Ebola outbreak in the US? Nope, because everyone did everything to stop it.

Ebola is also a highly visible disease and it isn't spread through the air. In terms of containment, it's far easier to identify and confront than Covid. I don't believe it's a fair comparison.

Monkeypox is highly visible too, sometimes scarring for life your face and hands. It's going to be pretty clear in 6-12 months who the people were that took this seriously, and who the people were that went YOLO.

Presumably the ones going YOLO are the ones who have "had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse"?

Highly visible starting from 14 to 21 days after exposure and unclear whether symptoms start before or after becoming infectious to others. So visibility may not actually matter much here, because pre symptomatic may be significant spreaders.

"when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad"

There is no value to acting at the government level. If there's any work to do here it's with pharma firms. Governments have shown repeatedly that they lack even the most basic skills needed to fight disease. They are literally incapable of even accurately defining their goals and basic words let alone actually defeating a disease:

- COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past.

- Highly vaccinated places have more cases than lower vaccinated places (e.g. Scotland vs England, former DDR vs rest of Germany). Almost all "deaths in proximity to a positive COVID test" are in the vaccinated. Fauci, vaccinated 4x, has now had COVID symptoms for a month and counting after Paxlovid failed to cure him.

- Mask mandates were repealed with no increase in cases.

- Birth rates 9 months after vaccination reached women of childbearing age (never tested in the trials) are now ~15%-20% lower than normal.

- Lockdowns are now widely recognized to have had no effect at all. Shanghai's toughest lockdown in the world led to people starving because they weren't allowed out to buy food, whilst simultaneously failing to reduce case counts.

- The vast sums of money required for these failed anti-COVID policies have now wrecked the economy, leading to the highest inflation ever seen for people under the age of about 45.

- Public health officials have repeatedly made scientific claims they knew were false in order to manipulate people's behavior and then admitted to lying on the record in major newspapers.

That's just a tiny sampling of the recent failures of public health. What we need is for these people to go away, reflect on their failures, learn about 1000 lessons and come back in a decade when they have managed to clear house and fix the systematic vulnerability to pseudo-science that typifies their field.

Of course, what they'll actually do is ignore monkeypox because fighting it means inconveniencing gay men, whilst waiting for the next virus they can try to make into COVID2.

I mean, just your first fact is wrong on its face.

> COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

If you're going to make counter-prevailing claims, you're going to need some solid references to back up your data, sport.

Normalize by positivity rate when using that source. I said case counts, not positive test counts. People are testing less than in the past but sources which control for that show higher numbers.

Again, my larger point about references stands. You have a counter-prevailing narrative. If you want to be a truthsayer, come bearing unimpeachable references for your data.

Fine - here's a reference for you. I didn't include any previously because I thought this was well known. It's for the UK because the UK has some data sources that are survey based and independent of how much people choose to test/when:

https://health-study.joinzoe.com/post/1-in-15-have-covid-in-...

"Prof Spector: While COVID cases continue to soar to all-time highs, the rate of increase is showing signs of slowing down."

That was for the end of March. ONS survey tracks similarly and shows numbers heading back up to the prior peak already achieved in March. The page has some useful graphs that put it in perspective and show the scale of the problem.

It's matched by anecdata from the people around me. In the past few weeks most of my friends have reported getting COVID. It's just a cold so it puts them in bed with lemsips for a few days, not a big deal, but the massive incidence rates are very noticeable. One friend said he got COVID and had to cancel some meetings, but two were already cancelled by the other party for the exact same reason. That sort of thing hasn't happened before and for some of them, it's their first time. So it feels correct that infection rates are off the charts. Multiple perspectives yield the same answer.

You can't have it both ways though - covid cases soaring to all time highs AND claiming the measures we had in place to attempt to contain infection previously weren't working at all. FWIW I agree many governments haven't done a great job of managing covid over the last 2-3 years, and providing funding for vaccine research and organising/ subsidizing distribution is obviously the most successful policy that's been pursued. But there are huge discrepancies between countries/states with governments that took the business of pandemic control seriously and those without. Once this is all truly over hopefully some good meta- studies can be done that help us understand which policies are the most effective, particularly in the period before vaccines are available/ effective.

I see why you may think this but look at the timings. E.g. in the UK the restrictions were mostly removed in the middle of last year. Cases actually fell sharply once the remaining rules were removed.

The increase in cases this year is being driven by a mix of Omicron and vaccine imprinting. It's not related to restrictions. If it were the latter you'd see changes in policy and changes in cases line up very closely as the serial interval of SARS-CoV-2 is only a few days.

"Once this is all truly over hopefully some good meta- studies can be done that help us understand which policies are the most effective"

Oh it's been done many times already. You aren't aware of the studies and meta-studies because they don't get reported on. They don't get reported because what they show is that everything that's been tried has failed. The media, being highly complicit in pushing restrictions on people and heavily dependent upon public sector 'expertise' for giving their stories credibility, will not report on this failure.

If you want to get a flavour of it, reserve a block of a few hours and then go flick through the archives of some non mainstream anti-lockdown sites like dailysceptic.org, where they do report such things. You'll find a bunch of studies that amount to "we looked at all the data and found no correlations between stringency of policy and outcomes".

For example, excess mortality in Sweden in 2020 (which should have been very high according to the epidemiologists due to lack of restrictions) was zero for under 75s. And if you count from the start, excess death overall (all ages) is the same as for Denmark, which had much harsher restrictions. If you examine all the data simultaneously using statistical techniques you get the same null result.

If your best evidence is that from "non mainstream anti-lockdown sites" then I'll remain on the fence until I see something there's good reason to have faith in.

Plenty of countries avoided the horror scenes seen in others, and I'm very glad to have lived in one of the former, even if many of the restrictions introduced were unjustifiably harsh (and I argued against many of them at the time).

Why? Do you think they're less reliable or science-oriented than outlets like the BBC? It's the opposite: they are more reliable and much more science based. The authors there read research papers and write articles based on what those papers actually say, not what people in power wish they said.

As a consequence you should have more faith in them, not less. Regardless, ignore the contents of the articles themselves and go direct to the sources, if you wish.

Also consider: your refusal to go outside establishment media is exactly why you aren't aware of any of the studies or meta-studies that have been done on effectiveness of counter-measures. You're literally wishing in public for information that already exists, but the only people who are willing to cover such news are those who aren't conflicted by prior pro-lockdown stances.

I found papers examining excess mortality and the comparison between Sweden and similar countries - and while it's somewhat surprising that it appears to be the case that it's only among those aged 70 and over that higher levels of excess mortality have been observed in Sweden, it certainly doesn't show restrictions weren't justified or effectual. Aside from the lives lost (plenty of 70 yos have another decade or so of productive and fulfilling life to lead), the impact on healthcare workers having to deal with the extra load of hospitalisations etc. can't just be dismissed out of hand (my partner worked as a nurse occasionally attending to covid patients in aged care homes here and despite our case numbers staying relatively contained, the impact was traumatic for many of her co-workers who were fulfilling that role full time). Further, it's still too early to be certain covid among younger people won't affect excess mortality in the coming decades. It's already the case that a percentage of those who survived nasty bouts of covid are suffering reduced quality of life as a result.

That article's dated March 31st 2022, and it correlates with the ourworldindata chart I posted above, which also shows a big decline since.

And, if you do some research among reputable sources on vaccinated vs unvaccinated hospitalization and death rates, you'll find a significant pattern there.

The graph you posted is affected by the end of mandatory testing, which is why you now need survey results. Mandatory testing acted as a sort of very poorly controlled "survey" because people couldn't opt out, but now testing is done almost entirely at home using LFTs without results being reported, you need a recruitment survey approach.

In the UK there was a decline after March 2022 but now, as I said, it is heading back up again and has nearly reached the same peak as previously:

https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time

2022 is showing much higher peaks than other years when you use data sources not affected by the collapse in testing levels.

"vaccinated vs unvaccinated hospitalization and death rates, you'll find a significant pattern there."

I think in many countries the hospitalization rate for vaccinated/unvaccinated now matches the underlying proportions, i.e. no effect on hospitalizations or deaths any longer (and possibly never, due to how the data was being distorted by various factors previously, but that's a harder case to prove due to government data secrecy).

We would not have ANY COVID vaccines if not for the _billions_ of dollars the US government spent with Operation Warp Speed. The entire operation (warp speed, building and funding multiple vaccines at once to only keep the working one at the end) was something the government designed _decades ago_ and kept as a potential mitigation for pandemics. We're in a position for you to comfortably post hot garbage takes from a brand new throwaway account from the COVID-free safety of your home because the government acted to respond to this pandemic...

> The entire operation (warp speed, building and funding multiple vaccines at once to only keep the working one at the end) was something the government designed _decades ago_

That’s just not possible. Rapid-response vaccine platforms didn’t exist.

And indeed [1]

> The idea for Warp Speed was hatched in early April, says the official, a scientist, who was given permission to discuss it with Science if his name was not used. "Looking around, it became clear that without a really heroic effort, none of the existing efforts to produce vaccine was going to lead us to have vaccine to prevent what looks increasingly like a second wave that could sweep come October, November."

[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/unveiling-warp-speed...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1

> In particular, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched in 2017; its goal is to create the technological infrastructure needed for rapid and affordable development of vaccines against several of the viruses known to have epidemic potential, including MERS, Ebola and Zika. CEPI has partly funded work on SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, including that by Moderna and at Oxford.

CEPI is where the idea for Operation Warp Speed came from...

More generally though the article I reference is chock full of instances where without government funding and help we would never have had vaccines so quickly. The crackpot poster I replied to was trying to insinuate government did nothing and could do nothing to help. This is an absolutely incorrect assertion. We have vaccines because of government help and response in the early days (and years preceding!) of the pandemic.

At the moment the virus is confined to that part of the gay population that attends wild orgies - healthy young men. Mortality for that segment of the population is low, although by all accounts monkeypox is still exquisitely painful. Once it gets to pregnant women we will see miscarriages in 4 out of 5 cases. Things will improve then, but not before.

It's not confined to just the gay population. The UK has a child in the ICU over it for example: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1614153/monkeypox-British-...

Many states in the US are confirming there is community spread happening, i.e. it's not restricted to a subset of the gay or hetero community. Here's Seattle for example confirming there are cases with no known sexual encounter or link: https://publichealthinsider.com/2022/07/06/monkeypox-update-...

As an LGBT guy:

Yes, there are non-gay people who get it. But gay men, and particularly people who have sex with a dozen different partners in a week (not many straight men in that particular group), are much more likely to contract it. Efforts to limit the spread of monkeypox should be targeted at the demographics most likely to contract it, as you get much more bang-for-buck that way.

The cat's out of the bag when community spread is confirmed like we see now. The time to take targeted measures for a community getting hit hard by it was a month ago when it was the dozens and low hundreds of cases. Now we're seeing 2k+ cases worldwide a day, and that's with very low testing. We need to shift into proper pandemic response mode--TETRIS, test-trace-isolate.

There is nothing inherent about the DNA of this virus that makes it target men, gay men, or men who have sex with men. It will infect any human in the wrong place at the wrong time, period.

If this thing does jump out of the gay community and into the general populace and kids start dying or being scarred for life it is going to potentially set back the acceptance the gay community has gained by decades. They are going to get absolutely hammered by the right and probably the center as well.

Bang-for-buck. A little too on the nose.

You are going to love the just breaking news about another possible Marburg (Ebola cousin) outbreak in Ghana.

“There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.”

Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes.

But, living in Chicago? The minute they made the vaccine available for monkeypox, there were lines out the door. Through the roof demand. (Through the roof of Steamworks, because in a move that makes total sense but is also totally hilarious, the first pop-up event was at a bathhouse.) We will get this vaccine in a heartbeat.

But we can’t. Because, in part…the FDA slow walked the inspection of the single plant that produces this vaccine. So it won’t be at full capacity for quite a while.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-de...

Men are not the greatest at self control, regardless if they are gay or not

I am a gay man and I don’t go around having sex with everyone, i am very selective and I like building relationships

> Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes.

As compared to whom? All those straight men and their renowned self-control?

It’s pretty well documented that straight men have a harder time finding partners for anonymous/casual sex than gay men do. It’s like a whole complex for people, almost to the level of being a meme. https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tinder-work-for-average-guy...

As a gay man, I could absolutely be getting a blowjob in the next ~2 hours (conservatively) if I dropped my standards enough - almost anywhere. I don’t think that’s true for straight men; self control isn’t the limiting factor.

So say that then.

Saying gay men lack self control is a different claim entirely, not to mention offensive.

Stereotypically, straight men are rate-limited by straight women, so the stereotypical self-control of straight men is not terribly relevant. It's not the bottleneck, so doesn't enter the equation.

With gay men, since they are having sex within their own group, the amount of self-control for that group directly affects the rate for that group.

Those straight men's urges are kept in check in by women. I've been responding to several of your comments and it seems you don't have a good understanding of the dynamics at play in the MSM community. As I bisexual male I most certainly do.

As a bi guy, I'm pretty sure I could go out and have enough male sexual partners to catch monkeypox before I could get a single date with a woman.

ETA: given some napkin estimates, it's actually more like a 10% chance, though it wouldn't be surprising if it jumped up to >50% in a month or so depending on spread.

lol dude - I’m gay. Please continue to tell me more about my people.

My mistake. That's why I said "seems". In that case, I'd argue you are unaware of how heterosexual relations differ.

Well, we should not ignore that the gay community is diverse and that there is room for vastly different experiences within it

>At this point in time Monkey Pox is a known disease and the fact that it is highly transmissible via male on male sex is a known transmission vector. If people insist on engaging in high risk sex with multiple partners while a communicable disease is running rampant, at what point does it become their responsibility? HIV is still a thing too and people continue to engage in this high risk behavior.

Some numbers on said high-risk behavior: Gay men on average have six times the number of lifetime sexual partners as straight men or women (<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/>), and Psychology Today says 50% of gay men in San Francisco have more than 500 partners (<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/...>).

Relying on altruism is clearly not working. So we have to consider how to properly incentivize responsible behavior.

On the one hand, I agree with you. People should be more responsible.

But if your strategy is "people should have less sex for a while" then your strategy will fail -- just as our "everyone stay home for two weeks" didn't work for Covid. Even if most people will follow the guidelines, enough people won't and your strategy will fail.

So, yes, it is a government failure that we didn't have vaccines on hand for virus we stopped vaccinating for a long time ago. These are things we can control. We give the CDC a lot of money to help prevent these things.

By the way -- you can't get a test if you're not a man that has sex with men -- and that's very likely skewing the results. On Twitter many straight people report having blisters and symptoms but are denied tests because they don't fit the profile.

Very bizarre to me the way that avoiding covid was moralized and yet the same public health professionals seem more than a little skittish to do so around this. Particularly when the behavior is easier to avoid than breathing the same air as other people.

I'd also like to add that having group sex in public places is not the only way to have sex. Your comment seems to conflate this with all sexual activity.

Yeah... I was mostly in favor of Covid restrictions but it's bizarre to say that "no doing [huge list of normal things everyone does]" is fine and if you don't play along you're a plague rat, but balk at "maybe avoid having tons of anonymous sex with strangers for a little while" because that's just unreasonable.

Reasonable or not, resistance to that suggestion is a reality. We have to play the hand we're dealt.

We shouldn't have moralized the response to Covid either.

Trying to shame people into getting vaccinated blew up in our faces -- we now have an entrenched group of people that seem to be opposed to all vaccines, not just those for Covid-19.

People will have sex in ways you and I don't approve of. If your plan is to get them to stop -- it won't work. Just as telling people not to visit their family during Covid didn't work.

A better plan is to get people vaccinated, make testing fast and easy, and to inform people about risk profiles.

If you're deliberately engaging in risky behavior, you don't also get to blame the government for the consequences. The government is not there to facilitate every possible impulse people have at all times.

Note how puritanical feelings about sex and sexual minorities come into play here.

> A grandma dies because her family ignores rules around not gathering during Covid-19 -- tragic.

> A young man dies because he has sex with too many partners -- well, he should have known about the risks.

It actually seems to be the opposite, from what I've seen. There's a Reddit sub with half a million subscribers, /r/HermanCainAward/, created to make fun of people who were cavalier about Covid and ended up dying from it. There's no sub for people who had tons of unprotected sex and got AIDS or monkeypox, and I'm pretty sure one would get banned immediately if it was created.

Yeah, and that sucks. Those idiots on Reddit should stop.

That’s my point - it’s not effective there or here, for Covid or Monkeypox.

I doubt the people shaming people with illness even think doing so will help change behavior. They probably just enjoy dunking on people they think are beneath them.

I mean... "fuck around and find out" or similar was a pretty damn common response when people who chose to publicly ignore common-sense precautions died of Covid.

Come on there is a pretty clear difference between getting sick because you just existed along side other people and breathed the same air vs repeatedly inserting your penis inside multiple other people in a single night knowing the risks. There are tons of happy monogamous homosexual couples who are not at risk. If you cant see that you are very much willfully blind. Puritanical feelings have nothing to do with it. No none deserves to die from any virus but the assumption of risk implied is very different. It doesn't make any death less tragic than another though.

Insinuations of homophobia are not helping your case. We're talking about having anonymous group sex vs. breathing air. I would feel the same way and see the same glaring distinction if we were talking about a heterosexual orgy.

Well shit, he shouldn't have sex as much maybe? It's a very avoidable behavior.

I in general do not understand why these dudes do these insane sexual things. I always knew there were people out there who made sex a big part of their lifestyle, but group sex with double digit partners in the last month?

Holy shit not only is that incredibly bizarre to most people, but it's unreasonable to suggest it can't be avoided. Is there just no monogamy in the gay male community?

There seems to be a mindset among a large number of people that if a person's behaviors fall into certain socially "protected" categories, that they should be able to do whatever they want, with no consequences, or if there are consequences, they should be compensated for by the rest of society.

> Is there just no monogamy in the gay male community?

Of course there is. There are also, for example, gay men who obstain from sex altogether for religious reasons. These group just doesn't get as much attention.

But the distributions are a bit different and the tail of the distribution is longer. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/

    Number of partners, last year [median, range]:
    * Heterosexual men: 1 (0–99)
    * Heterosexual women: 1 (0–7)
    * MSM (Urban Men’s Health Study): 4 (0–500)
    * MSM (Seattle MSM RDD): 2 (0–300)
    
    Number of partners, lifetime [median, range]:
    * Heterosexual men: 8 (1–99)
    * Heterosexual women: 6 (1–99)
    * MSM (Urban Men’s Health Study): 45 (0–9005)

According to data from Okcupid, gay and straight people have about the same median number of partners. It's a small fraction of the gay community that is having just a ridiculous amount of sex.

There may be a sampling bias from okcupid, for both demographics, since iirc okcupid is more about dating than it is hookups.

I'm not sure how that is related to my comment unless you are suggesting that I also hold those beliefs.

Yea, with COVID, we found out the hard way that moralization and shame does not work on people without morals or the ability to feel shame for their actions--a significant enough portion of the population. It's why unenforced, voluntary restrictions were doomed to fail. Sadly, I don't think most countries learned this lesson, and when the next COVID comes around, we're going to make the same mistakes and act surprised that they cause the same results.

Oh we learned the lesson. The lesson is that countries like China that implement draconian pandemic restrictions on and off for years are far too unstable and unpredictable to live in and do business in.

> we found out the hard way that moralization and shame does not work on people without morals

In guilt oriented cultures, people have a moral conscience, which is a counter-balance to social shaming. Such people don't rely upon others to tell them how to live a moral existence.

In shame oriented cultures, people are more concerned about what other people think of them, and can more easily be coerced to 'order themselves harmoniously' (Confucius).

> we now have an entrenched group of people that seem to be opposed to all vaccines, not just those for Covid-19

This group existed in the US long before COVID. I'm curious to see evidence that the messaging around COVID vaccines increased its size.

Not sure about the US but outside the US it has vastly increased its size. Most of the people I know in my local community are unvaccinated, and none of them ever expressed any opinions about vaccines before COVID. Many are tech firm employees or former tech firm employees.

The so-called "anti vax" community was supposedly a tiny minority. In the country where I live, the majority of the population is not boosted despite the government advising everyone to get a booster. Most people now recognize that government health advice about vaccines is wrong and to be ignored. That wasn't the case even just one year ago.

IMO it's the advice about THIS vaccine, not the other long-established vaccines that are normally given in childhood.

People are nervous about new vaccines initially. There's some history to justify it, for those who remember the Swine Flu in the 1970s. They want to wait and see if they are safe. That doesn't mean they are opposed to all vaccines, or even that they are being completely rational on the basis of statistics. This is normal human fear of new things.

Should be fairly easy to tell, if more parents start balking at the "normal" vaccines their young children should be getting. Pre-COVID, the hardcore antivax group was tiny, so any growth should be easy to spot.

There is a long and dark history to moralizing and even legislating how and when consenting adults can have sex with each other.

So maybe it's a bit like discussing eugenics. It wasn't a particularly difficult topic when people like Plato were abstractly philosophizing about ideal societies, but it is a charged topic today because we have seen where that road leads in practice.

It's also easier to ask people to make shared sacrifices which everybody should bear equally.

I actually agree with you, I think HIV proved that people very much allow their sexual needs to control them even when theirs and others lives are at risk. It was not so much a strategy as cry out to the universe for people to have some common sense and respect for the safety of themselves and others. It would be such a simple win if people just kept their pants on or at the very least limited themselves to one sexual partner at a time for a little while. Its Darwinism screaming at us in the face. This will likely be a situation where the government is forced to step in and save people from themselves.

Norway has already reached (at least) 22 cases [1]. The top article at the front page of the national broadcaster is now about the lack of information and options for testing [2]. Also, many affected people do not develop the typical blisters

[1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/22-tilfeller-av-apekopper-i-norge_-...

[2] https://www.nrk.no/norge/er-smitta-av-apekoppar_-_-vanskeleg...

is it just me? From a external POV it looks like they didn't even start the fight.

Like NR1 rule for fighting a virus outbreak is to properly educate about it. And idk. but I seem more "it's a problem of gay people" then I see "it's transmittable through skin contact and body fluids including indirect transmittance".

Through I'm not in the US so I just see what "bubbles over" into various "international bubbles" I'm in.

I am not naturally a doom merchant, but with the disease of this nature it is likely that by the time the country knows it has a problem it is already well established. We know already that the population of specific interest does not generally follow advice on limiting the spread of such diseases very rigorously. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong this time, but I doubt it. Behaviours tend not to change.

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are quite adept at changing behavior as needed. Before HIV was even identified as the cause of AIDS, it was known from the basic epi that unprotected anal intercourse was a high risk activity. There was a grassroots effort to (among other things) encourage condom use, and a dramatic shift towards using condoms. It's only with the subsequent generations of MSM who did not see their friends die (thanks to better medications starting) that condom use started waning. A similar behavior shift happened after 2012, when HIV PrEP was found to be effective.

If you're interested in this topic, there's a couple of really good documentaries about the early HIV epidemic and how gay men adapted: "how to survive a plague" and "we were here" are two of my favorites.

During the early days of the HIV epidemic, front-line medical professionals in San Francisco received death threats when they when they suggested that bathhouses voluntarily close down, or at least turn up the lights so people could see if their partners were covered in KS sores.

You can read about their experience at the University of California San Francisco's AIDS Oral History Project: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/oral-history-proj...

Death threats: https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt2m3n98v1;NAAN=13030&doc.v...

It's pretty clear that The System's capacity for rapid response to emerging situations is nil. People on every level of the hierarchy keep following the same old routines they always do. Even when it doesn't make sense anymore. There needs to be accountability. It needs investigating: Who should have done something, and why didn't they?

“scientists say” inspires so much confidence (speaking as a scientist).

Also from the Times: “Will There Be Enough Monkeypox Vaccine?”

Jynneos, the company that makes the better vaccine for monkeypox, was in the middle of refurbishing the one plant that produces it.

“The manufacturing facility that could make more has been shut for a planned expansion since last August. The facility is not expected to reopen until late this summer at the earliest, and additional vaccine manufactured there may not become available for at least six months after that.”

(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/health/monkeypox-vaccine-...)

So that’s a bit of a problem. We do have a smallpox vaccine that seems to have significant cross-reactivity to monkeypox, but, the side effects can be unpleasant. (https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/monkeypox-vac...)

Will this actually become a serious pandemic? I dunno. I have friends who have contracted this. But they did so at…um…let’s say underground parties. I’m really unclear if this will spread to the general population, as it is primarily spreading within men-who-have-sex with men networks. (My friend who got it over Memorial Day shook it off pretty easily, other acquaintances contracted it too recently to judge the full course of the disease yet.)

Ok so far the us has 0 fatalities associated with monkeypox and there are well known and effective vaccines that can also be used therapeutical after infection. Seems like a bit of sensationalist trying to make it a bigger threat than it seems to be in reality.

It's also not airborne and requires direct contact with infected tissue.

We should stop calling it monkey pox as it's clearly a new, human adapted variant...

It actually spreads and comes from rodents.

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