Monkeypox and Lessons Learned from COVID 19

In the past few weeks, more than 550 cases of monkeypox — a viral disease and a much milder cousin of smallpox — have been reported in more than 20 countries worldwide. That’s a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Monkeypox has surfaced periodically in the Congo Basin and in West Africa since its discovery in the 1950s, but past outbreaks haven’t involved cases in this many countries, or this degree of apparent person-to-person spread.

As far as we know from past outbreaks, monkeypox usually isn’t very contagious and a good vaccine already exists, it ought to be possible to contain even this apparently larger outbreak. Hence many public health officials have emphasized, in their communications about monkeypox that people shouldn’t worry or overreact.

Panic is never a good public health strategy, but in attempting to preemptively tamp down public fear, I think experts are failing to learn one of the most important lessons of Covid-19: that we’re too afraid of “alarmism” when outbreaks hit, and should spend less time telling people not to overreact and more time telling them what’s actually going on.

There are some solid epidemiological reasons to conclude that monkeypox doesn’t pose the same threat to the world that Covid-19 did in 2020. Instead of condemning alarmism, experts should acknowledge the many reasons for that alarm.

The world is horribly vulnerable to the next pandemic, we know it will hit at some point, and dozens of undetected cases of monkeypox around the world  in non-endemic countries — despite the fact it typically has low transmissibility — show how profoundly we’ve failed to learn the lessons from Covid-19; we need to avoid catastrophic re-occurence of viral diseases.