Fauci shares the 'uh oh' moment he realized monkeypox was getting out of control in a way that is 'very reminiscent' of HIV
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Hilary Brueck
Aug 4, 2022, 19:39 IST
Dr. Anthony Fauci at The National AIDS Update Conference on October 12, 1989 in San Francisco.Deanne Fitzmaurice/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Dr. Anthony Fauci says the way monkeypox is spreading in the US is "very reminiscent" of "the early days of HIV."
It's "very troublesome to me, having been there 41 years ago," he said.
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Officially, more than 6,600 people across the US have been diagnosed with monkeypox since May 18, when the first domestic patient in this outbreak was discovered in Massachusetts. Public health experts say the true number of monkeypox cases in the country is probably much higher than that.
Positive tests have been trickling in over the summer — first a drip, then a pour, up to a flood of new monkeypox diagnoses logged every day.
But it was before all this — in late spring, early summer when data was starting to show monkeypox "efficiently" passing from person to person in the US — that Dr. Anthony Fauci got a sinking feeling he's felt before.
"I said 'uh oh,'" Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, told the podcast Science Vs. when asked what was going through his mind as the number of cases in the US outbreak kept growing and growing.
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"That's very reminiscent of what we saw in the early days of HIV," Fauci said, expressing concern.
Unlike past monkeypox diagnoses logged in the US, this year's cases haven't been confined to prairie dog owners and their close contacts, nor were they the result of recent travel to West Africa. Instead, by and large, the monkeypox lesions seen in this outbreak have been spreading in intimate areas of the body, among men who have sex with men.
"It was sort of a gradual 'oh my goodness,'" Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said. "From the very first beginning, the epidemiological circumstances under which it occurred was very troublesome to me, having been there 41 years ago with HIV."
At the time, Fauci thought maybe "it was just a fluke," he told journalists gathered at a vaccine conference in 2019.
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In the early 1980s, Fauci said there was a lot of "confusion" about how the virus was transmitted, with people wondering: "is this a strange disease of gay men?"
"As it evolved, literally week after week after week, you'd get the unfolding and the evolution of the epidemiology — which made it clear that it wasn't restricted just to gay men," Fauci said.
He believes we can — and will — take control of this outbreak
Unlike the HIV crisis, Fauci is hopeful that the current monkeypox outbreak won't end up with millions of people infected around the globe needing treatment.
"Anything is possible, but it is unlikely," he told Science Vs. "If we continue to put our foot on the pedal, get as many people vaccinated as possible, get control of it. I believe we can do that."
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