Monkeypox: The Pandemic They Tried and Failed to Make Happen
No sooner had the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ subsided than, in 2022, the monkeypox ‘pandemic’ came into view, global health officials waving graphs, emergency declarations and, inevitably, vaccine contracts.
The parallels with early 2020 were so obvious that they hardly needed repeating: ‘outbreaks’, ‘containment’, isolation periods, R values, variants (in breaking news, the WHO has reported a new recombinant variant of monkeypox: one case in the UK and one in India, but fears there may be more unreported cases, naturally), and the sense that the public must be coached, firmly, into behaving as if a handful of cases were the opening credits of the next apocalypse.
An outbreak in search of some numbers
Early on, the UK was ‘ramping up efforts’, people were advised to isolate for 21 days (the maximum incubation period), and Belgium reportedly flirted with mandatory isolation. The NHS advice was comparatively low-key, and even some US voices suggested this was not the ‘next Covid’. But the calm did not survive long.
The problem for the doom-mongers was that monkeypox refused to cooperate. It did not spread like wildfire and it did not fill hospitals. Reports from the WHO spoke of suspected cases and deaths in ways that were less than transparent: more deaths than confirmed cases were reported in one summary.
Monkeypox has long been endemic in parts of West and Central Africa, and outside Africa the 2022 outbreak was heavily concentrated in a specific high-risk group: men who have sex with men.
Public health agencies insisted, often with convoluted, euphemistic prose, that ‘anyone’ could be at risk, while simultaneously describing transmission driven by close physical contact, particularly sexual contact.
The effort to avoid ‘stigma’ became an excuse to avoid specificity, and specificity is precisely what you need when you are giving risk information. If the disease is overwhelmingly concentrated in one behaviour-linked network, pretending otherwise does not reduce stigma; it reduces clarity.
The WHO eventually elevated monkeypox to a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, reportedly overriding the advice of its own committee. This is the modern pattern: declare an emergency first, then reverse-engineer the ‘imperative’ to justify it. Meanwhile, the global health ecosystem – newsletters, professional outlets, NGOs, ‘law institutes’ and the usual alphabet-soup agencies – produced headlines about “unprecedented spread” and “urgent coordinated action”.
Micromanaging private life did not start with monkeypox, but monkeypox shows how quickly it returns once an ‘emergency’ is declared. For example, the CDC’s “safer sex” advice issued guidance to “masturbate at least six feet away from your partner”.
The vaccines: a call to arms
Once you have declared an emergency, you need a product. In this story the products were chiefly smallpox-derived vaccines: JYNNEOS (also known as Imvanex/Imvamune, sometimes described as MVA‑BN), LC16 and ACAM2000. The CDC itself noted that clinical efficacy and effectiveness data for monkeypox disease were limited, yet orders rolled in anyway, including large US purchases. Children were even floated as targets after a tiny number of paediatric cases. Once you have warehouses of doses, you need arms.
As with Covid, the numbers reported for monkeypox vaccine effectiveness depended on the public not understanding basic arithmetic. Figures like “85% effective” or estimates that JYNNEOS is “66 to 89% effective after two doses” were reported. These are almost always relative risk reductions (RRR): how much less likely a vaccinated person is to become infected compared with an unvaccinated person in the same setting.
What matters to the person being asked to roll up their sleeve is the absolute risk reduction (ARR): how much your own risk falls when vaccinated, taking into account how likely you were to catch the disease in the first place. When the baseline risk is tiny, ARR is tiny, even if RRR is impressive. If you were going ‘over the top’ in the First World War, you would want to know your chance of dying, not merely that you were 85% less likely to die than the man next to you.
Take a US-style illustration from the monkeypox material. Using CDC-type figures, annual incidence in 2024 was about 3,000 infections in the United States, roughly 0.0009% of the population. Even if the vaccine is 100% effective and the risk to the vaccinated group is 0%, then the RRR is 100%. But the ARR is 0.0009%. That means you would need to vaccinate about 111,111 people to prevent one case (NNT = 1/ARR).
If you use a more realistic ‘85% effective’ figure (again, RRR), the NNT to prevent one case climbs to around 130,700. To prevent one death, the numbers become frankly comical: depending on the infection fatality rate estimates used, the NNT to prevent a single death in the United States falls somewhere between roughly 111 million and 556 million people.
And this is before we add the perfectly predictable ‘side-effects’ paragraph, because every vaccine comes with one. For JYNNEOS and ACAM2000, you see the usual list: local reactions, fever and tiredness, and then the more worrying bits that some people prefer not to emphasise. ACAM2000, for example, carries known risks including myocarditis, and cannot be administered to certain immunocompromised groups. Yet the very population most vulnerable to severe outcomes is often defined by immunocompromise.
Who profits from monkeypox?
If large proportions of the population are ‘willing’ to receive a monkeypox vaccine, you are talking about tens or hundreds of millions of doses. With prices in the hundreds of dollars per dose in some settings (and lower negotiated prices elsewhere), the sales totals become vast: orders of magnitude larger than the burden of disease they purport to address. Manufacturing costs, by contrast, are estimated in single digits per dose in some discussions, which is the sort of margin that makes shareholders feel the warm glow of civic duty.
The CDC price for vaccines is $229.50 per dose (for private-sector hospitals it is $270) and for low- and lower-middle-income countries UNICEF have negotiated a price of $65 per dose. Assuming that all the doses in the United States are obtained at the CDC price then, if the 58% of the population keep their word and roll up their sleeves once, that represents $44 billion in sales. The JYNNEOS vaccine is estimated to cost between $3 to $10 per dose to manufacture, meaning profits of between $42 billion and $43 billion for a single dose rollout. Double that for two doses.
Africa: where the story becomes shameful
The monkeypox story is particularly revealing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Here, deaths and severe outcomes are entangled with malnutrition, poor sanitation, conflict, limited healthcare access and HIV. In other words, the drivers of mortality are structural and material. People need food, clean water, safety and basic medical infrastructure. But we send them vaccines, because vaccines are what the global health machine knows how to do.
Follow the money and the picture becomes familiar. GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) is central to vaccine distribution in the DRC. GAVI is closely linked to the Gates ecosystem: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a major funder, has a permanent seat on GAVI’s board and, along with other channels, contributes materially to WHO funding. Vaccines are one of the Gates Foundation’s biggest investments, with substantial biotech holdings.
The incentive structure is simple: invest in vaccine platforms; fund the institutions that define the problem and endorse the solution; use allied agencies to procure and distribute; repeat. The mechanism reliably funnels public money into private pockets. And it does so even when the disease burden is tiny and the absolute benefit is microscopic.
Then there is the moment that distils the whole affair into one image: Japan supplied vaccines to the DRC, but not enough refrigeration to store them safely. Doses had to be discarded because they could not be kept at the required temperature.
And yet the infrastructure remains: surveillance desks, committees, newsletters, procurement channels and the assumption that the correct response to any infection, anywhere, is more testing, more tracking and more vaccines.
And let’s not forget ‘Long Mpox’
The latest attempt to manufacture concern comes in the form of so-called ‘Long Mpox’, in 2026 headlines claiming that more than half of patients suffered lasting physical effects. However, the underlying study reported only about 20% with persistent symptoms, and even those were self-reported rather than clinically diagnosed. The remainder had only mild, intermittent or resolved complaints.
Worse still, the comparison groups were fundamentally different: the monkeypox group was overwhelmingly male, largely composed of men who have sex with men, and included a high proportion of HIV-positive participants.
The symptoms reported: persistent lesions; anorectal or genital pain’ and discomfort during intercourse, are therefore just as plausibly linked to lifestyle and underlying health conditions as to any prior monkeypox infection. In other words, this looks less like a genuine post-viral syndrome and more like the familiar attempt to conjure up a ‘long’ version of a disease that, for most people, is mild, rare and self-limiting, complete with familiar talk of asymptomatic spread and PCR testing.
What’s the Lesson?
Monkeypox can be unpleasant, and for vulnerable people in poor settings it can be serious. But for most people in the developed world, it has been rare, mild and self-limiting. In that context, mass vaccination campaigns make little sense once you stop quoting RRR and start calculating ARR.
The monkeypox episode is best understood as a rehearsal: a test of how quickly the pandemic-response apparatus can be reactivated, and how easily it can pivot from one virus to the next. It is a story about political, bureaucratic and commercial incentives more than it is a story about a disease. Public health should be judged not by the urgency of its press releases, but by the actual benefit to real people.
Professor Roger Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
source dailysceptic.org