Until 2022, it was believed that the virus did not really know how to spread from person to person by airborne droplets. This seemed to confirm that the longest chains of infection from person to person had no more than six human links. That is, the basic reproductive number R - the number of people that one patient can infect - was less than one for long periods of time. Even a few Africans who ate dangerous game could only infect two or three other people, those only one or two, and so on.

True, the authors of one scientific work, using simulations, counted in monkeypox R even higher than two. However, as is easy to see from her text, she relied on not entirely realistic assumptions. And in the end, R is an important but not decisive thing: we recall that the R of most influenza strains is below two. Nevertheless, influenza constantly circulates in the human population.

Now, one study has come to light suggesting that similar experiments could have been carried out in Wuhan with the monkeypox virus. The article "Efficient Assembly of a Large Fragment of the Monkeypox Virus Genome as a Template for PCR Using Transformation-Associated Recombination Based on Double Selection" was published in Virologica Sinica (Journal of the Wuhan Laboratory). The article described attempts to create a monkeypox virus that could be identified using PCR tests. Researchers have successfully created a "genomic fragment of the monkeypox virus."

the likelihood that the monkeypox virus could have escaped from the laboratory in Wuhan because of this or the experiment is small. However, the very fact that these experiments were carried out is alarming, given the experience of the coronavirus pandemic. An email exchange between Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and American Anthony Fauci stated that the lab "accidentally created a virus capable of rapidly transmitting between people." In the same letters, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health warned that the publication could harm "international harmony."

Useful link:

Multi-country monkeypox outbreak in non-endemic countries (who.int)