So, have you heard about mpox?

From the article:

COVID was completely unfamiliar when it first appeared, but monkeypox is a known quantity, and experts on the virus actually exist. One of them, Andrea McCollum of the CDC, told me that based on existing studies, monkeypox doesn’t spread easily, and not over long distances through the air. It transmits via contaminated surfaces or prolonged proximity with other people, which is why most outbreaks have been small, and why people have mostly transmitted the disease to either household members or health-care workers. “This isn’t a virus that, as far as we’re aware, would really take off in a population like COVID,” she said. “It really requires close contact for human-to-human transmission.”

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For decades, a few scientists have voiced concerns that the monkeypox virus could have become better at infecting people—ironically because we eradicated its relative, smallpox, in the late 1970s. The smallpox vaccine incidentally protected against monkeypox. And when new generations were born into a world without either smallpox or smallpox-vaccination campaigns, they grew up vulnerable to monkeypox. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, this dwindling immunity meant that monkeypox infections increased 20-fold in the three decades after smallpox vanished, as Rimoin showed in 2010. That gives the virus more chances to evolve into a more transmissible pathogen in humans. To date, its R0—the average number of people who catch the disease from one infected person—has been less than 1, which means that outbreaks naturally peter out. But it could eventually evolve above that threshold, and cause more protracted epidemics, as Bergstrom simulated in 2003. “We saw monkeypox as a ticking time bomb,” he told me.

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Within days, scientists should have sequenced the viruses from the current outbreaks, which will show whether they harbor mutations that might have changed their properties. Within weeks, European epidemiologists should have a clearer idea of how the existing cases began, and whether there are connections between them.

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Also, there’s already a vaccine. One smallpox vaccine is 85 percent effective at preventing monkeypox and has already been licensed for use against the virus. And as another bioterrorism precaution, stockpiles of three smallpox vaccines are large enough “to vaccinate basically everyone in the U.S.” Inglesby said. And though monkeypox patients usually get just supportive care, a possible treatment does exist and has also been stockpiled: Tecovirimat, or TPOXX, was developed to treat smallpox but would likely work for monkeypox too.