That lag is, at this point, more familiar than maddening. But it’s genuinely infuriating to see Covidian patterns replaying with a completely different disease — the broadly non-fatal but still-pretty-terrible monkeypox epidemic, which the Biden administration just officially declared a public health emergency.

If Covid-19 probably would have overwhelmed even the most effective public-health bureaucracy, monkeypox — which as of now is mostly spread through close human contact, especially sexual contact, and for which we already have a vaccine — offered a chance to replay the Covid outbreak at a milder degree of difficulty. Yet the same kinds of bureaucratic failure were repeated — too little testing early on, too little interagency coordination, too little preparation for what should have been predictable challenges.

And then along with these failures came an absurd ideological spectacle, in which health officials agonized about how to state the obvious — that monkeypox at present is primarily a threat to men who have sex with men — and whether to do anything to publicly discourage certain Dionysian festivities associated with Pride Month. As the suffer-no-fools writer Josh Barro has exhaustively chronicled, public-health communication around monkeypox has been an orgy of euphemism and wokespeak, misleading and baffling if you don’t understand what isn’t being said.