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A New Monkeypox Strain
Dear reader,
Two years ago, monkeypox broke international news went it suddenly caused a global outbreak the likes of which had never been seen before. An outbreak so massive that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
(Although it may be hard to look back on it now, COVID-19 was still a considered a PHEIC at the time too.)
The new found success of monkeypox, a disease previously confined to a dozen countries in West and Central Africa, was due to a novel strain capable of sexual transmission. A strain that largely spread among homosexual and bisexual men, which brought with it flashbacks of the HIV epidemic response and its many flaws.
This was when I began to write about monkeypox.
My first story (published that summer) was a simple intro: Monkeypox: The New Public Health Emergency on the Block — “How bad is monkeypox?” in 4 minutes. What is it? What are the symptoms? How does it spread? What were we doing about it?
A few days latter I wrote about how a vaccine developed against smallpox by Bavarian Nordic had been granted emergency approval against monkeypox, in a effort to fight the outbreak. And by December, I published an…
