Why don’t they like the name Moneypock$ ?

And why would Tedros declare a Public Health Emergency of international Concern (PHEIC) for moneypox?  Because $money [pox] talks, and that declaration enables WHO to call for more funding.  

Turns out that the first PHEIC was declared in 2009 for the low severity swine flu epidemic. PHEICs were first defined in the International Health Regulations, which came into force in 2005.   The $moneypox PHEIC is the 6th time the WHO Director-Generals have invoked such an emergency over the past 13 years.  Hmmm…

Below, I reproduced part of a long article on the complications of changing the $moneypox name, today in STAT.  But it WILL be changed, they say:

Monkeypox the virus

… The virus — actually the species of virus — is going to get a new
name by next June. But that new name will almost certainly still contain
the word monkeypox.

The naming of virus species is the responsibility of the
International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Coincidentally, the ICTV
is in the process of giving virus names in general a major overhaul, to
pull them into compliance with the way other life forms are officially
named.

Most other species have binomial names. Humans are Homo sapiens.
Bacteria have binomial names too — think Escherichia coli (often written
as E. coli) or Staphylococcus aureus.

Monkeypox is monkeypox. But that’s going to change.

A subcommittee of the ICTV that is responsible for revising the names
of the various poxvirus species is in the process of finalizing a
proposal for new binomial names for all the poxviruses. Within the next
month or two the proposed names will be circulated to the poxvirus
research community for feedback before being finalized by next June, the
ICTV’s deadline for this work.

When that process is completed, monkeypox is very likely going to become Orthopoxvirus monkeypox.

“That’s certainly the majority proposal at this stage,” Colin
McInnes, chair of the poxvirus subcommittee, told STAT in an interview.
McInnes is deputy director of Scotland’s Moredun Research Institute,
which studies viruses that affect farmed animals.

The subcommittee is aware of the mounting discontent over the name
monkeypox. It is sympathetic to the concerns about stigma, McInnes said,
and it is not unmoved by the complaint that monkeypox is a misnomer.
Monkeys aren’t the natural host — the reservoir — of the virus, they are
just the first animal that was seen to be suffering from the disease.

But the true reservoir host isn’t known. And there are a
number of species of viruses that are named in the way monkeypox virus
is, after the first animal species seen to have been preyed upon by the
virus in question.

Moreover, the committee is concerned that dropping the monkeypox name
could disconnect future scientific papers about the virus and the
disease from the more than 50 years of science already in the
literature.

“By no means have we come to a final decision yet, but certainly I
would say the majority of the committee was in favor of retaining the
name monkeypox, just in terms of the danger of losing out on all the
early scientific, epidemiological research that is out there. And
obviously that’s quite a lot,” McInnes said…