For many people, COVID-19 fears have long receded, replaced by a sense that public health bodies failed us when they were needed most. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially lied about mask efficacy in order to ration them for frontline workers; were slow to approve diagnostic tests, which were frequently riddled with problems; were slow to approve vaccines, even those that had been approved by European health regulators; and, when vaccines were finally approved—after regulators had taken weekends off—let teachers and other workers skip the line ahead of elderly people to receive their vaccine doses, erroneously assuming this would get teachers to return to their shuttered classrooms.
Now, both the CDC and the FDA are repeating the same mistakes. California, Illinois, and New York have declared states of emergency over their rates of spread, while nearly 6,000 cases have been reported nationwide. For gay and bisexual men under age 50 who have never been vaccinated against smallpox (which confers decent protection against monkeypox), accessing the vaccine as quickly as possible will be the best way to minimize this outbreak's harm.
