We need a new disfiguring disease that scares the shit out of people. We were too good and eliminated smallpox. We nearly eliminated polio and measles. Monkeypox failed (thank you, doctors, scientists, and everyone who got vaccinated!)

…So now we need a new one that causes people to either get extremely fucked up and live, or extremely fucked up and then die horribly, and slow enough to warn people in their communities.

Apparently, a subset of the population cannot remember the olden days, and vaccines in schools aren’t compulsory anymore.