The monkeypox outbreak has captured the attention of an anxious public that’s struggling to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and is on high alert for the next virus that might upend our lives.
Fortunately, professionals are a lot calmer about monkeypox than the armchair pundits.
“In the last couple of years, everybody’s become a virologist,” said Paula Cannon, an actual virologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. “We don’t have to get crazy scared.”
Unlike the situation two years ago with the then-novel coronavirus, scientists are already familiar with this virus. They know monkeypox is nowhere near as transmissible as COVID-19, nor is it particularly deadly. They know how it spreads and how it can be stopped.
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It’s a less lethal cousin of smallpox, a far more vicious virus that killed roughly 30% of those it infected. Thanks to vaccines, smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980.
Ironically, that success has opened the door for similar viruses, like monkeypox, to creep into the human population.
The vaccines that protect against smallpox also work against its weaker cousins, but they haven’t been part of standard childhood immunizations since the 1970s. There’s just been no need for them. As a result, most people under the age of 50 have no immunity to this kind of virus.
