Today is day 85 since the first confirmed US monkeypox case. If you graph out cases relative to the gay male population, it starts to look a lot like the 84 days of early 2020: infecting ~0.2% of the population. COVID-level growth in gay men.
And I say this obviously not to stigmatize, nor to blame, nor to scare.
I say this because I agree with @benryanwriter in his powerful Op-Ed today: gay men need to protect and care for ourselves because our institutions aren't doing that.
twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1557712101518589953
This is COVID-level growth in our communities. Remember what happened when COVID hit? Do you see anyone or anything taking this ANYWHERE near as seriously as the infections in the gay male community? I don't.
We need vaccine, yes. But we also need *vaccine data.* We do not know very clearly how effective this vaccine is. Getting your Jynneos today does not mean you're in the clear next week. Gay men are still getting MPOX early after vaccination. We don't know how protective it is.
So we have to talk about changing (or pausing) behaviors. Sexual practices. Hookups. @fakedansavage started to talk about this in May. Many others have. But many others haven't.
I guess it's better to let your community get a disease than be direct and honest with them?
Gay men tend to really care about their bodies and their health—partially because we learned from HIV/AIDS that the federal government wasn't going to. And we need to do the same with monkeypox: care for ourselves, our community, and stop this painful, awful disease.
*Yes we need more testing, yes I realize there are non-gay-men getting MPX
*Yes I realize some people are getting it without sex
*AND ALSO STILL gay men are the most impacted, and most cases are probably from contact during sex
**I'm estimating ~5.9M gay men based on the US population and the most recent US census data survey, acknowledging these #'s are rough, that not all gay men are high risk and not only people who identify as "gay men" are high risk for MPX.
www2.census.gov/about/training-workshops/2021/2021-06-24-data-summit-presentation.pdf