World Health Organization

GENERAL ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE

MPOX is a painful infection that time and again over the course of its history has found ways to harm some of the most marginalized among us. Beyond the disease itself, its outbreaks have brought with them a crippling stigmatizing force echoing the ugly remnants of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As you explore the standard approaches of responding to the disease itself I implore you to look beyond the disease itself. What can we do to protect against a-factual, harmful, or prejudicial responses to these outbreaks particularly when they are concentrated in marginalized populations? What underlying determinants are making these populations more vulnerable to this infection and how can those be addressed in the acute sense? What can we do to strengthen our public health system going forward, moving beyond any individual pandemic or epidemic and rather seeking to inhibit the next one?