“We’ve been sort of screaming for a month about how bad the diagnostic situation is for monkeypox. And that really was a clear error, preventable, and it’s very clear that this administration has not learned lessons from early COVID,” said James Krellenstein, co-founder of the HIV treatment advocacy group Prep4All.

Jon Andrus, an adjunct professor of global health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, said the U.S. is lucky that monkeypox is not as contagious as COVID-19, or as deadly, because the public health system is underfunded and overly fractured.

“I think we’ll continue to repeat these mistakes because that’s been our track record. That’s been our track record. We’ve had, what, more than five or six waves of COVID, and we seem every time to be a little bit caught off guard,” Andrus said. “Stopping transmission requires that we’re all reading from the same page. We all have the same road map.”