Under our current age of Trump, it’s frankly stranger when the federal government doesn’t do something completely unproductive. The latest bit of pointlessness? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has switched back to using the name “monkeypox”—an outdated label for the disease mpox.

NPR was the first to report on the name switchback, which appears to have been implemented sometime in the last month. Nearly three years ago, virologists pushed for monkeypox to be retired, both for being potentially stigmatizing and factually inaccurate, since monkeys aren’t the primary hosts of the virus in the wild. HHS confirmed the switch to Gizmodo but offered no elaboration as to why it did so.

Why the change?

In November 2022, the World Health Organization officially adopted the la

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