Experts: Team Biden is blowing it on the monkeypox outbreak - Hot Air

A deadly virus begins spreading undetected in the United States, threatening to burst beyond the ability of quarantine and therapeutics to stop it.

Scientists know all about monkeypox: They know how it spreads, they know how to stop it.

Clinicians, patients and some administration officials have faulted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing criteria that they say are too narrow and have resulted in long waits — sometimes multiple days — in identifying positive cases.

If you’ve followed the news about Europe’s monkeypox outbreak, you know that should have triggered alarm bells in his doctor.

A virologist based in the city told WaPo that “he was aware of a dozen similar cases in which people with possible monkeypox symptoms were being rebuffed.”.

“ring vaccination.” But the more the virus spreads undetected, the more contacts there are to trace, and suddenly it becomes logistically impossible to run down everyone who might have been exposed.

has 36,000 doses of the leading monkeypox vaccine stockpiled; if there are, say, 6,000 people infected right now and each has six close contacts, that’s every last dose accounted for — if we can find those contacts and get it to them immediately.

There’s another thing you know as well as I do, which is that the more people a virus infects, the more chances it has to mutate into something more contagious or more virulent or both.

“Considering that this 2022 monkeypox virus is likely a descendant of the one in the 2017 Nigeria outbreak, one would expect no more than five to 10 additional mutations instead of the observed about 50 mutations.

We hope that now, specialized groups will perform laboratory experiments in order to understand if this 2022 virus has increased its transmissibility.”.

It may be that monkeypox has been spreading quietly in western nations for awhile, having stumbled into a key mutation at some point that made it more transmissible, and the result has been the global outbreak we’re now experiencing.

There’s also good news in how the virus spreads (for now): Despite its many mutations, it appears that you need skin-on-skin contact or something very close to it in order to contract it