The message that anyone can get monkeypox, widely disseminated by public health officials and the media, is not incorrect, but it is misleading. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists direct contact with monkeypox sores, respiratory secretions during face-to-face contact, sex, cuddling, and touching contaminated items as potential transmission routes—but they’re not all equally risky. The raging social media debate about whether monkeypox can be considered a sexually transmitted infection misses the point: Right now, it is primarily spreading during sex and, like most STIs, it can be transmitted other ways as well.

While anyone could potentially catch the virus through close physical contact, the “vast majority” of people getting it now are gay and bisexual men, according to CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. In a recent study of more than 500 cases in 16 countries, 98 percent were among men who have sex with men, and sexual contact was identified as the likely transmission route in 95 percent of cases…

COVID taught us the perils of making predictions about a new epidemic, but many experts do not foresee an explosion of cases outside gay men’s sexual networks. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, for example, considers the likelihood of monkeypox spreading further among networks of people with multiple sex partners to be high, but the chances of it spreading among the broader population to be “very low.”