COVID-19 and monkeypox are pretty different diseases. But the parallels between the nation’s yearslong, languishing response to the coronavirus pandemic and the emerging monkeypox outbreak are many – and potentially agonizing.

“Without even finishing the COVID pandemic, we’re already facing monkeypox,” said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security and a founding member of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.

Health secretaries declared both viruses to be public health emergencies, inviting greater coordination, pushing for more urgent action and freeing up more funding and resources at the federal, state, local and tribal levels. But despite all that, the U.S. response to the monkeypox virus (or MPXV) has been criticized in ways that are hauntingly familiar, said Dr. Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

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