February 2, 2025 - 8:00am

The latest World Health Organization data on mpox, the virus now widespread across Africa, suggests that the infection, while clearly unpleasant, is rarely fatal. Although most cases have occurred in developing countries, relatively few have died: 272 out of 124,753 confirmed cases in 128 countries, or 0.2%. For comparison, the last two winters saw more than 18,000 deaths in the UK which were associated with influenza, and in the week ending 13 December 2024 alone there were 524 deaths from flu and 123 from Covid-19.

Yet when two businessmen returned in mid-January from separate work trips to Uganda and saw doctors about isolated spots on their skin, they found themselves engulfed by what one, whom we will call “Anthony”, described as a “living nightmare”. He had just two spots and a mild fever, but having tested positive for mpox at a local Sussex clinic he was detained in a car park by medical staff dressed in hazmat suits. After a short stay at a Brighton hospital, he was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital in London in a five-vehicle convoy, with police cars using their flashing lights and sirens at its head and rear.

Arriving there, Anthony was detained in a bleak, isolated room for almost a week, visited by nurses wearing PPE and three layers of gloves. “I was given a strong impression that I had to obey,” he told me. “I asked what would happen if I decided to discharge myself and go to the pub. They said that was not an option. To me, it felt like overreach.”

The other patient — “Giles” — had just one spot on his hand and no other symptoms. But when a throat swab tested positive, he was told he should throw away his soft furnishings at home unless he had them steam-cleaned. He was also ordered to attend a hospital in Sheffield, many miles from his home, for further testing. Giles’s wife received multiple phone calls telling her not to fulfil work engagements, and was warned that she would otherwise be “endangering the nation’s health”.

Meanwhile, the source of these instructions, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), briefed the media about the positive tests, prompting the Daily Mail to remind readers that last July the WHO declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern” — just as it had done with Covid “a few weeks before the virus ripped across the world”. The two men, the newspaper claimed, had contracted a new and “deadly strain”.  But while it is true they were infected with the Clade 1 mpox variant, there is no evidence that this is any more serious or transmissible than Clade 2, the strain it has largely replaced.

The UKHSA is headed by Jenny Harries, the Government’s former deputy chief medical officer, who often spoke in support of lockdowns at televised Downing Street press conferences during the Covid pandemic. She currently manages an annual budget of £400 million — hence, Anthony suggests, “the tens of thousands they must have spent on detaining me and the blue-lamp convoy”.

Given the panic around mpox, the two men’s reluctance to let me publish their names is understandable. Yet Giles showed me the lab records stating that his first Covid-style PCR test had to be run through 30 separate cycles before the virus could be detected  — which means that in order to be confirmed as mpox, his miniscule viral load had to be amplified more than a billion times. His second test needed 38 cycles, and was thus amplified by a factor of 274 billion.

Moreover, he had received a smallpox vaccination as a child, which hugely reduces the risk posed by mpox. Yet this, he says, was not taken into account, although “I was almost certainly not contagious.”

Like Anthony, Giles says he was given the impression that the UKHSA had a legal power to order him what to do, but this is not the case. For orders to isolate to be legally binding, the Government would have to pass statutory instruments under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, as it did during the Covid pandemic. These expired in 2022, and have not been renewed.

I asked the UKHSA to comment on the two men’s treatment, and whether it was disproportionate to the level of risk. Dr Will Welfare, its Incident Director, responded: “Clade 1b mpox is currently classified as a high-consequence infectious disease in the UK and can potentially cause severe illness and death. The risk to the UK population remains low. However, as people would expect, we are doing everything we can to prevent it from spreading in the UK. We continue to review the emerging evidence on mpox clade 1b.” He added: “If evidence suggests that it no longer meets this definition, then it would be downgraded.”


David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

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