We all saw this play out in March and April of 2020 with COVID, yet here we are again, making the same mistakes with Monkeypox. Caught up in the last mess as an ER nurse, It seemed like we failed completely. How could we have been so unprepared?
Watching the current crisis unfold, it occurs to me I wasn’t factoring in one important variable.
Solving problems in the lab is very different than solving them in the real world. Once your cohort becomes the entire population of the country, much less the planet, it becomes exponentially more difficult to control.
Labs are orderly. People are messy.
This is not to make excuses for the apparent failures of our government and public health agencies. Rather, it’s just an acknowledgement of why the problem of controlling viral outbreaks seems to fail with depressing regularity.
It’s true we eradicated smallpox and polio, but that was in a time before the Internet, and both of those initiatives took years, if not decades, to implement.
Of course, back then there were no social networks, no tsunami of misinformation, and no ability to attempt to fact-check epidemiology much less immunology. Two topics, BTW, that cannot be fully understood by trained medical professionals, much less the population at large.
Sadly, controlling global populations seems to be a fools game at worst, or a process taking years at best.
In the meantime, try to avoid skin on skin contact with other humans.