Two weeks ago I queued for more than five hours outside a London hospital to receive a monkeypox vaccination. But I’m one of the lucky ones; thousands of people in at-risk groups haven’t been so fortunate, and it’s about to get worse. Britain, despite being one of the centres of the outbreak, expects to run out of vaccines in the next couple of weeks, with no further deliveries planned until late September.
This matters because it’s a race against time to prevent monkeypox becoming an endemic disease. At that point, we’ll be stuck with it, and it will continue to circulate at low levels indefinitely, with regular danger of outbreaks and possibly new and more dangerous variants. Even in the optimistic scenario that it gets no more severe, lives will be lost. And while LGBTQ+ groups have led the way in demanding a stronger response, we know that the disease is particularly dangerous for several groups, including small children, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems.
