START BY DITCHING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency that has had its reputation battered by a series of missteps in the Covid-19 pandemic, and a slow response to the monkeypox outbreak, will undergo an "ambitious" overhaul, Director Rochelle Walensky announced Wednesday.

In an email to staff, Walensky said the renewal effort will focus on making the agency more nimble and responsive to needs that arise in health emergencies. The priority will be to gather data that can be used to rapidly dispense public health guidance, rather than craft scientific papers.

Walensky also said the agency needs to acknowledge the flaws of its response to Covid-19. Those mistakes date to the earliest days of the pandemic, when a test designed by CDC scientists to detect the new disease failed to work on the ground -- leaving the country blind to how quickly the SARS-CoV-2 virus was transmitting at a critical juncture when aggressive measures could have slowed Covid's spread.

Since the outset of the global monkeypox outbreak in May, public health and infectious disease experts have told the public that the virus is largely transmitting through skin-to-skin contact, in particular during sex between men. 

Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself -- both anal as well as oral intercourse -- is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.

In recent weeks, a growing body of scientific evidence -- including a trio of studies published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as reports from national, regional and global health authorities -- has suggested that experts may have framed monkeypox's typical transmission route precisely backward.  

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