ELECTION NIGHT — For tonight’s primary results, POLITICO has you covered from analysis to elections tallies. You can find live results on our pages for California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. And to fill in the gaps, our campaigns reporters and editors will be breaking it all down in real-time in our live chat, starting at 11 p.m. ET. They’ll wrap up the evening results and talk California for an hour. DON’T PANIC — After our experience with Covid, it’s hard not to feel uneasy about monkeypox. New outbreaks of monkeypox have led to more than 1,000 cases in at least 29 countries. The CDC has said people who travel to places with a lot of cases, work with animals or men who have sex with men are at highest risk for infection. The risk to the public is low, the agency says. But how low? POLITICO’s Daniel Payne and Carmen Paun wrote a helpful Q&A with everything we know about the virus right now. Nightly had a few more questions for our in-house experts, so we talked to Daniel over Slack today. This conversation has been edited. Should I be freaking out? There’s no reason to freak out about monkeypox at this point. Concerns about the unexplained spread may seem a lot like what we were hearing about Covid-19 in March 2020, but monkeypox is far less transmissible — and we already have vaccines and treatments at our disposal. Still, public health leaders are concerned about the new outbreaks that are popping up around the world. Do you feel there’s an overreaction because of the Covid pandemic? Or are people responding more to the fact that it’s kind of a spooky name? Experts keep telling me that there’s more interest in infectious diseases now than ever because of the pandemic. More people plugged into the subject probably does mean more people are reacting to this news. The name probably freaks people out a bit, too — as does the characteristic symptom, skin lesions. What are the theories for why it’s spreading? Much of the spread in the new outbreaks seems to be between humans — and that’s also true for many endemic cases. Monkeypox mostly spreads through close contact, researchers believe, so this is very different from a virus like Covid-19. Many cases seem to come from sexual contact, particularly in men who have sex with men. But because transmission is now more widespread than experts thought possible, it’s important to emphasize that there are a lot of unanswered questions about how monkeypox spreads. This isn’t a new virus. But is the level of spread, these case numbers we’re seeing, unprecedented? Right — some researchers believe this virus has been around for centuries. And several countries have been treating cases for decades, but because it was mostly contained in endemic countries, in West and Central Africa, there hasn’t been much concern about global implications. That’s what’s unprecedented here: It’s very unusual to see so many outbreaks outside of that region, and experts now believe there is widespread community transmission in new places. Why is it endemic only in parts of Africa — how does that work? There are now a lot of new questions about that, given the outbreaks in new places. There are some links to certain animal species that live in endemic regions. It’s still unknown exactly which species are responsible for spreading the virus. Not all those animals are primates, by the way — many of them are rodents. It can also just be generally hard to stamp out transmission once it’s started. How do the experts you’ve talked to rate the government response so far? Some immediate government responses so far have made sense, like making large orders for therapeutics and new generations of vaccines for outbreaks. But there has been a decent amount of criticism that the world did not collectively deal with this problem earlier. We have known this disease is a problem in some countries for decades, and there have been plenty of opportunities to study and develop responses to it. But those opportunities largely weren’t taken until now — until wealthier nations in Europe and the Americas found themselves with cases, some researchers pointed out. And now, as governments are stocking up on vaccines and therapeutics, there are questions of inequities in supplies — especially because most cases are still where they were last year and the year before: West and Central Africa. What are the biggest unknowns here — as a health reporter who follows this closely, what’s your biggest concern? The big question seems to be: Why is this happening? There’s a lot more spread — including in places where there hasn’t been much before — and researchers are racing to understand why that is. There are other questions, too, about how well our current tools will work in this new context and how exactly transmission works — but I think public health officials (and reporters like me) will be focusing on the reasons for the new outbreaks and what measures will be needed to stop them. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com or on Twitter at @MyahWard.
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