The Bittersweet Defeat of Mpox

The world was worried that monkeypox could become the next global epidemic. The US recorded 600 cases a day at one point in August, and the health authorities fumbled their response. There was a shortage of vaccines for most of the fall. The testing was slow. The drugs were almost unobtainable because they hadn't been approved for use in the US. While most cases were among gay and bisexual men, there were fears that the infections could spread to the rest of the population.

Today's things look very different. The World Health Organization changed the name of the disease to mpox in December, but the spread had slowed. As of December 21, the US had recorded nearly 30,000 cases, more than a third of the total.

While one reason is that access to vaccines and testing improved, and another is that mpox is inherently much harder to transmit than Covid, the biggest, most agree, is that the people most at risk took their protection into their own hands. Joseph Osmundson is a professor at New York University and a queer activist.

A fleet of tall, white-painted vans with windows masked for privacy may be a symbol of the response to mpox. The New York City health department ran a vaccine clinic inside each van. These vans are parked outside of bars and clubs that cater to gay and bisexual men between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Many of the parties shut down for a while. The venue owners agreed that protecting their patrons was worth the stigma of having the vans parked outside. The program gave more than 3000 vaccinations.

The program showed a health department being smart about where to find people who needed help, but it also showed a community that wasn't willing to wait for the health bureaucracy to find them. Some people who caught the disease posted online videos or gave press interviews about their symptoms in order to warn other people about the risks. When most physicians had never seen a case of mpox before, people posted information about which clinics still had vaccine supplies and how to get it. The advice for people to pass on to their doctors is for people who got antiviral treatments before they were available.

Most people agree that queer men with a lot of sexual partners get the credit for the ski-slope decline. According to research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men who felt at risk of contracting STDs voluntarily abstained from sex, kept to one or a small number of partners, and signed out of hook-up apps.