Monkeypox, also known as mpox, is once again spreading throughout the world from Africa. “Thailand has confirmed Asia’s first known case of a more contagious and potentially deadlier version of the mpox virus with its transmission modes changed,” reports the Global Times.
Thailand’s Department of Disease Control confirmed on Thursday that a 66-year-old European patient who had travelled to Thailand from Africa was infected with the Clade Ib, a new, potentially deadlier strain of mpox, the first in Asia, and the second outside of Africa, according to the BBC News.
Sweden was the first place outside of the African continent to confirm a case of Clade Ib a week ago.
The infected man had also recently travelled to an unnamed African country, according to Sweden’s public health ministry, as reported by BBC.
…the transmission of the mpox virus in the past was primarily through direct contact or sexual contact. However, the variant of the Clade Ib that has been identified in Thailand is more contagious and threatening and can be transmitted by infected animals and passed from human to human through close physical contact, human secretions (such as respiratory droplets), rash or contaminated items.
The groups most affected by this mpox outbreak are women and children under 15 years old, as reported by People’s Daily, quoting WHO figures….many children in Africa were not vaccinated with smallpox vaccine, [but] the administration of the [smallpox] vaccine is effective [against monkeypox]….children…in Africa, tend to have relatively weaker immune systems, and their nutrition is often poor….Given the crowded living conditions of many African children, if a family member is infected, the risk of spreading the virus through close family contacts is high since they are highly likely to share the same room.
Monkeypox previously spread across much of the world in 2022, but that was a less contagious, less lethal version of the disease. In 2022, thousands of people in the U.S. suffered from monkeypox, as gay sex orgies spread the disease across America. Virtually all of those who got the disease in the U.S. in 2022 were gay men, as articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere noted.
This newer, more contagious strain of monkeypox could affect a much larger section of the public, including women and children. “Evidence from past outbreaks indicates that the viral strain spreading in Central Africa is more lethal than the strain that sparked the 2022 global mpox outbreak, which has since infected more than 95,000 people and killed more than 180.”
It is unclear whether the U.S. government will be as inept if monkeypox reaches the U.S. as it was back in 2022, when the government utterly failed to stem the spread of monkeypox. Back then, a single vaccination for monkeypox could require a hundred pages of government paperwork, doctors complained. “The federal government has not only failed to get its act together to bring monkeypox vaccines here from Denmark but also made it a nightmare for doctors to prescribe the vaccines we do have on hand,” reported Reason Magazine back then.
As Reason Magazine reported in 2022:
One of the big challenges doctors are facing, besides the lack of availability of one vaccine, is jumping through the appropriate hoops to provide a different vaccine…There are more than a million doses of a vaccine named Jynneos in a storage facility in Denmark that is awaiting approval to be sent to the U.S., even though the facility has already been inspected by European officials.
There’s another drug, TPOXX (full name: Tecovirimat), that can also be used to treat people infected with monkeypox. But access to the drug is restricted ….rules and documentation [are] required to attempt to treat somebody infected using the drug… this process requires physicians to fill out 100 pages of paperwork for each patient they want to prescribe TPOXX to….medical leaders complained that this red tape made it “nearly impossible” to treat potentially hundreds of infected patients. It can take up to three hours to process a single patient just to get them the drug…The blame is being laid on the poor response of President Joe Biden’s administration. Sen. Richard Burr (R–N.C.)… sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra:
Beyond failures in testing, the administration’s strategy to utilize vaccines and treatments that are effective against monkeypox has also been appalling. We have vaccines and treatments that we can use during this response. These tools are available in large part due to the resources the United States has provided for smallpox preparedness through Project BioShield….But securing a stockpile of vaccines is only effective if we are able to get shots in arms.
The Biden administration let pointless red tape stop delivery of 1 million monkeypox vaccine doses. “The U.S. may be losing the fight against monkeypox, scientists say…weaknesses in the public health system are giving the virus a chance to become entrenched,” reported the New York Times:
As epidemics go, the monkeypox outbreak should have been relatively easy to snuff out. The virus does not spread efficiently except through intimate contact, and tests and vaccines were at hand even before the current outbreak.
Yet the response in the United States has been sluggish and timid, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid pandemic, experts say, raising troubling questions about the nation’s preparedness for pandemic threats.
