[loeg]

Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.

[gruez]

>Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on

Just like how it's pretty clear that the coronavirus wasn't "a global emergency"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/health/china-virus-who-em...

[pengaru]

Monkeypox isn't airborne, so it's pretty easy to avoid contracting.

[arisAlexis]

No it wasn't but because your gamble won and with hindsight bias you can state that now.

[loeg]

If you think that is responsive to my comment, you're thinking of a much earlier point in time than I am.

[mustacheemperor]

It remained a non-event for the vast majority of the population because the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign. If a little extra screen time in the media made that campaign successful it paid dividends for public health, imo.

[loeg]

Because the messaging was so muddled by attempts to amplify fear[1][2] or to avoid stigma, straight people showed up to vaccination sites and took very limited Monkeypox vaccine capacity from the sub-population who was actually at risk. At the time, I read opinions[3] from gay men who would have really preferred that the messaging was more explicit about who was at risk (so that gay men knew to get vaccinated and straight people knew they weren't at much risk).

[1]: There were articles about fear of Monkeypox spreading in K12 schools, despite a notable lack of unprotected anal sex in a typical K12 setting. https://www.curbed.com/2022/08/monkeypox-nyc-schools-no-guid...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/health/monkeypox-masks-cd...

[2]: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/finally-some-good-news-about-mon... and https://www.joshbarro.com/p/how-not-to-talk-to-the-public-ab...

[yieldcrv]

I'm heterosexual and I checked the quantities locally they were always bountiful before I went for my shots.

It doesn't seem like there was any effort to rebalance the amounts, seems more like a bureaucratic issue that had nothing to do with me. Once a municipality got their allocation, that was that.

[WillPostForFood]

the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign

It looks like about 425k men were fully vaccinated, and another 250k got a single vaccine. That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/response/2022/vaccines_dat...

[loeg]

> That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.

The subset of gay men having unprotected sex with many partners is significantly smaller than the total population of gay men (about 7 million in the US).