"Even after it was evident that this painful, potentially disfiguring or even fatal infection was spreading through gay men’s sexual networks..."

"... public health officials and the media were hesitant to give the same advice they had given freely at the beginning of the Covid pandemic: Limit your number of sex partners and express your sexuality in socially distanced ways. But while health officials and journalists hesitated, gay and bi men sprang into action. Young men with lesions covering their faces took to social and mainstream media, telling the public... And the gay community listened.... So while an early and frankly honest public health response could have blunted the outbreak, resulting in far fewer cases and far less suffering, the swift collective action of gay and bi men prevented catastrophe.... When it comes to emerging health threats — even ones that can spread sexually — gay men can handle the truth. You can give it to them straight."

 
From "How Gay Men Saved Us From Mpox" by Ina Park and Dan Savage (NYT).

The monkeypox emergency lasted less than 9 months and was declared over in January. The article notes that : "When the first cases were reported among gay and bi men in the West, health authorities and the media couldn’t bring themselves to say the word 'gay.' To avoid stigmatizing gay and bi men, early reports buried the lead."

"They just needed a disease and they don't need it anymore."

 That's what I said out loud — just because I wanted to blurt something out — after reading the NYT headline "What Happened to Monkeypox?" 

I'm reading the article now, and I see that it's not about the political use of this disease. It's about how the cases are declining — down 85% since August, we're told.

"Experts" cite 4 factors:

First, vaccines helped slow the virus’s spread (despite a rocky rollout). Second, gay and bisexual men reduced activities.... The third reason is related: the Pride Month effect...

That is, apparently, during Pride Month (June), gay men had "more parties and other festivities [that] involved casual sex.

The fourth factor, experts tell us, is that a disease that spreads through close contact is "harder to transmit" and therefore "self-limiting virus." 

So what do you think of my knee-jerk, it's-all-politics answer? Was I just amusing myself, imitating a cynic?

"A sex party organizer in New York asked invitees to check themselves for lesions before showing up. And the organizers of the city’s main Pride celebrations..."

"... posted a monkeypox notice Sunday on their Instagram account... The virus, long endemic in parts of Africa, is now transmitting globally, and, while it can infect anyone, at the moment it is spreading primarily through networks of men who have sex with men, officials say.... 'Without meaning to make light of this, we have once again have been caught with our pants down by a global pandemic that we were not prepared for,' said Mark Harrington, the executive director of the Treatment Action Group and a long time AIDS activist...  The C.D.C....recently put out a sex-positive fact sheet on social gatherings and safer sex, which, rather than telling everyone to stay home, contains specific tips for avoiding monkeypox such as keeping clothes on during sex and not kissing... ... [Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist at New York University] and other activists have also been working through their own channels to educate the L.G.B.T.Q. community about the virus — for example, by crafting messages that sex party promoters can distribute to attendees that include photos of monkeypox lesions.'When I talk to my friends in the queer community, we want intervention,' Dr. Osmundson said. 'We do not want monkeypox. The spaces where we meet for pleasure and companionship, we don’t want those to be shut down, number one. And we like going into those spaces with as little worry, and as little risk, as possible.'"

 From "As Monkeypox Spreads, a Campaign to Warn the Public Gains Urgency/Be aware but don’t panic, say health officials and advocates as cases of the disease tick upward in New York and around the country" (NYT).

Just as I'm creating a "monkeypox" tag, I'm seeing "WHO to rename monkeypox after scientists call it 'discriminatory'" (WaPo). Discriminatory against who? I haven't read the article yet, and I can't work it out in my head. They can't be worried about insulting monkeys. We have swine flu and so forth, so naming the animals is standard. Does it have something to do with insulting black people? Gay men? Okay, now I've read it. The problem is that the disease is endemic in parts of Africa, and the media therefore tends to use pictures of African patients, and the word "monkey" in photo captions is susceptible to misreading.