This time, the virus with a curve that must be bent is caught not by breathing in shared air, but via skin-to-skin contact. This time, a visible rash and lesions make it easier to identify potential carriers. This time, doctors have decades of experience tending to patients and containing spread and a vaccine from day one.
Despite all these ingrained advantages, leaders’ failure to interrupt the rapid rise of monkeypox in America and in New York, the early epicenter once more, has felt achingly familiar to early struggles with COVID-19. As the city and state now declare a public health emergency, we risk remaining a disastrous step behind the virus for the foreseeable future.
The root of the problem once again was federal bureaucratic sluggishness, outrageous more than two years after COVID. Over a critical period, hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine (proven to be at least 85% effective in preventing the disease) languished in Denmark despite the production facility having been inspected and certified by European Union regulators. Instead, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took precious, painful time by insisting on conducting its own inspection of the plant originally planned for the fall. So too have tests and antiviral drugs taken far too long to obtain and resolve.
The local response hasn’t helped. Health officials here, overly worried about feeding a stigma, failed to urge men to change their sexual behavior while the disease spreads. That’s just sane public-health advice to the population among whom the virus is now almost exclusively spreading.
And when the city Health Department’s website offered vaccination appointments, glitches made it devilishly difficult for people to sign up. Hopefully, those failures will prove to be mere hiccups as thousands of vaccine doses, finally in hand, now enter more arms.
What began as an isolatable outbreak now counts among its victims 1,200 New Yorkers, a quarter of the nation’s cases — with nationwide cases about a quarter of the global total. Snuff it out now before it becomes a permanent feature of American life.
