Was monkeypox seeded in Nigeria 5 years ago in anticipation of a potential outbreak in the West?

Monkeypox reemerged in Nigeria in 2017 after disappearing for 39 years.

Now that's odd.

Here's a story from NPR.  I have left out the last part of the story, which is based on claims by Michael Worobey.  Worobey tried to cover up research into the origin of AIDS and more recently, the origin of COVID, so whatever he says about monkeypox should be examined under the lens of "why is he saying this?"

When Ogoina first diagnosed the young boy with monkeypox in 2017, Ogoina thought the virus would act the way it has for more than 50 years in other parts of Africa, the way that scientists described in textbooks. That is, outbreaks typically begin when a person comes into contact with an infected animal. "There was speculation that this young boy played with monkeys around the community," Ogoina says.

But in such instances, the virus didn't spread very easily between people because it was not very contagious, especially between adults. "[In the past], monkeypox affected mainly children," Ogoina says.

As a result, previous outbreaks of monkeypox have been small. They often involved only a few dozen cases. And they petered out on their own.

Ogoina and other doctors thought the outbreak in 2017 would be the same. "We thought, 'OK, this is the regular monkeypox that we know.' "

But a few weeks after diagnosing the young boy, Ogoina started to become concerned – quite concerned. The outbreak in Nigeria began to grow rapidly. Cases cropped up in counties not just near this one boy but all over. "Suddenly, we were seeing cases appear across the country," Ogoina says.

The virus seemed to be spreading further and faster than expected. And it wasn't infecting kids but rather men in their 20s and 30s. "Young, active men were getting monkeypox," Ogoina says. "It was very unusual at that time."

These men also didn't fit the typical profile for monkeypox patients. They weren't hunting or handling animals but instead were middle-class men, living in busy, modern cities. Ogoina wondered: "Why isn't it affecting children? Or females? Or the elderly? Why are we seeing only young men, ages 20 to 40?" (In fact, Ogoina and his colleague eventually figured out that the young boy didn't even catch the virus from an animal but rather from a male relative in his household.)

And the rashes that affected these patients weren't in the typical places where monkeypox struck. Instead of being on their face and extremities, the blisters occurred around their genitals. "They had very extensive genital lesions. Very, very extensive," Ogoina says.

Ogoina and his colleagues started to investigate these patients further. "We decided to do a sexual history assessment of some of the cases," he says. That assessment found that many of the patients had high-risk sexual behaviors, including multiple partners and sex with prostitutes.

So there was a huge realization: The virus had changed. For the first time, it was spreading through sexual contact. Ogoina and his colleagues even mentioned the idea in study published in 2019: "Although the role of sexual transmission of human monkeypox is not established, sexual transmission is plausible in some of these patients through close, skin-to-skin contact during sexual intercourse or by transmission via genital secretions," Ogoina and his colleagues wrote in the journal PLOS One.

Ogoina knew this shift in transmission had massive implications. It meant the monkeypox virus could more easily spread from person to person, that it no longer needed to jump from an animal into people. That it could possibly sustain human-to-human transmission in a way that it couldn't before. That meant the outbreak in Nigeria would be much more difficult to stop. It could possibly go on for years and eventually spill over into other countries. In many ways, the findings meant that monkeypox was no longer just a threat to communities in West and Central Africa but also a potential threat to the world.

Over the past few years, Ogoina says he has tried to warn health officials and scientists repeatedly that monkeypox had changed and was possibly spreading through sexual contact. At one international meeting, he tried to bring up the possibility of sexual transmission. Somebody told him to be quiet.

"Yes, someone told me that I should not say it. That I should not say sexual transmission is possible," Ogoina recalls with exasperation in his voice. "He told me, 'We should not worry about sexual transmission.' "

An outbreak that never ended

In 2017, Nigeria reported about 200 cases of monkeypox. And then all of a sudden, by the beginning of 2018, cases declined rapidly. On the surface, it looked as though the country had successfully controlled the virus and the outbreak had ended, just as all previous monkeypox outbreaks had...