Otherwise people will start killing monkeys indiscriminately.
I remember it. The name was changed during the pandemic of 2022, because in the west it was mainly affecting the gay men and LGBT associations thought that having "monkey" in the name of a disease affecting mainly gay men was stigmatising and pushed for a name change, and the WHO accepted.
According to Wikipedia the virus is still called "monkeypox virus" and the disease "mpox disease". One reason for the change may have been to have different names for these different things.
*formerly
Formally means the opposite, and I had to check the article to check what you meant.
Autocorrect…
fear of correlation to a racial slur
I suppose it was a strange choice of name in the first place.
It was identified in a monkeys originally, hence the name