The government has a bit of a conundrum. Given how Keir Starmer and his Labour colleagues damned the previous Conservative administration for failing to lock down the country early enough for Covid, what are they now going to do about the new strain of monkeypox (or ‘mpox’, as we are now supposed to call it)?
Come on, now is the time to act, when 548 people are reported to have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the first case has reached Sweden, and the World Health Organisation has declared a global health emergency. So what are you going to do? Ban travel from the DRC? Place into quarantine anyone who has been travelling in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa in recent months? Close swimming pools, ban contact sports, prohibit sex, and any physical intimacy outside marriage (which would be the equivalent of banning mixing of households in the case of an airborne disease like Covid) under pain of £10,000 fines?
I don’t see the government rushing to do any of these things, and for good reason.
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