U.S. Repeating Covid-19 Pandemic Mistakes

How’s that U.S. response to the monkeypox outbreak been going so far? Alas, during the “Monkeypox” segment on the latest episode of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” John Oliver scored the response a “no” on a scale of one to 100. If you are wondering, no, a “no” is not good. That’s sort of like being in the bathroom while the Olympic race that you are supposed to running in has already begun.

Gee, if only the U.S. had already had advanced practice in how to respond to an infectious disease outbreak, an epidemic, or maybe even a pandemic, oh, sometime in the past few years. If only public health experts and scientists had been offering suggestions on how to improve such a response and screaming, “listen to what we have to say,” on a daily freaking basis as well.

Well, Oliver pointed out that little thing called the Covid-19 pandemic, which by the way is still happening and is not bleeping over. On his show, Oliver opined, “Frustratingly, despite the fact that we’re still in the middle of the Covid pandemic, we seem to be replicating some of its key mistakes, from persecuting strangers to spreading misinformation, to badly mismanaging the public health response,” as you can see in the following video of the segment:

In fact, not only did the U.S. have practice from the Covid-19 pandemic, containing the monkeypox outbreak should have been decidedly easier. Unlike the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the monkeypox virus was not a novel virus to humans. As Oliver emphasized, “This was not like the early days of Covid, where we didn’t know anything about anything. Remember March 2020? We were Lysol-ing our groceries like they came out of the sewer, [Fox News contributor] Geraldo [Rivera as opposed to Brazilian footballer Geraldo Moreira da Silva Júnior] was on TV claiming you could test for Covid by holding your breath, and we did a show on the coronavirus on March 1, 2020, in which the main advice that we gave our full, unmasked studio audience was to wash their hands.”

Oliver added, “But with monkeypox, we were in the fortunate position of having pre-existing tests, vaccines, and treatments. Unfortunately, the rollout of each of them has been painfully flawed.” Yes, all the technology that was needed to contain this monkeypox outbreak had already been developed well before 2022. There was no need for Operation Beam Me Up Scotty or whatever that Covid-19 vaccine initiative was called in 2020. There was no need for same amount of scientific studies conducted in 2020 to better understand what the heck we were dealing with pathogen-wise. Yet, 2022 has turned out to be in some ways 2020 too.

When Oliver said, “we need to be ramping up testing and data collection, and getting vaccines and antivirals to those who need them the most,” did it sound like déjà vu all over again? How about when Oliver urged, “we badly need to restructure our public health system so it is better able to respond to a viral outbreak?” With all of the claimed economic growth in the U.S. that has occurred over the past few decades, relatively little of this has been allotted to the public health system. Heck, as Oliver has pointed out, many public health systems still rely on FAX machines. Yes, Silicon Valley and the co-called tech boom has provided us with now a multitude of ways to share cat videos and tell everyone that you love your burger, yet most of public health remains stuck in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which is the last time significant investment was made into the public health infrastructure.

Moreover, the federal, state, and local governments have been slow to respond and acknowledge the monkeypox virus as a real threat. It seems like a lot of political leaders have been more intent on convincing everyone that the U.S. is “back-to-normal” and that you can go ahead and start spending your hard earned money on random stuff again. As a result, “Every part of our early response to this made it harder than it needed to be,” according to Oliver.

Things haven’t been nearly as bad as in 2020 when the U.S. was caught with its proverbial pants down and some political leaders kept insisting that the Covid-19 pandemic was “rounding the corner” so many times that it felt like a a dodecahedron and were using openly offensive terms like “kung flu,” as I covered for Forbes back then. Oliver did say, “I will say, there have been some improvements recently. We’ve seen some progress on testing, more vaccines are finally coming with large numbers set to start arriving in October.”

Oliver may not be formally a public health expert, a medical doctor, or a scientist himself. But what he said on his show was consistent with what real public health experts, real medical doctors, and real scientists have been saying all along. It’s fair to say that the U.S. response to monkeypox outbreak has rated a “no” on a scale of one to a 100, while the U.S., response to Covid-19 has been a “oh, no.” And for many years the U.S. public health system has been a “no, no, no,” as in “no” not getting nearly enough attention, “no” not getting anywhere near the amount of funding it deserves, and “no”, the U.S. is not going to be able to stop the inevitable next infectious disease threat unless things dramatically change.