I thought about starting this diary with a picture of skin covered with monkeypox pustules, but I didn’t have the stomach for it.
Many indications are that monkeypox is here, and that it’s spreading especially quickly among men who have sex with men. Here are the numbers of all cases by state, as of today:
Sure, a vaccine exists. But you can’t get it right now. And it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change in the short term. Monkeypox has an incubation period of a couple of weeks, and most doctors don’t yet have tests for it. (Commercial labs just began testing for it today: thehill.com/....) That means those numbers are certainly well out of date.
Monkeypox is not AIDS, of course. AIDS had a fatality rate — before protease inhibitors — of just about 100%. Monkeypox is supposed to be something like 1% to 10%, and very likely on the lower end of that, especially among people who have access to good medical care.
And if things got very bad, I believe the Biden administration would get those vaccines out pronto.
But maybe they should be doing that already. What with the hook up apps and summer travel, it seems like there could be even more opportunities for transmission than there were during the run up to the AIDS crisis — that monkeypox could spread farther faster. Also, you can get monkeypox much more easily than you can get HIV.
Is this on people’s radar? Are people nervous?
I came out in the late 80s and was at least a little traumatized by the worst of the AIDS years (among men who have sex with men in the United States). So I am nervous. Those terrible years were recent enough that I remember them vividly, and far enough in the past that they almost don’t seem real. And our behavior is more or less just what it was back then. No moral qualms there: what consenting adults do with their own bodies is their own business. But I fear for us, myself included.