Monkeypox Starts To Recede as Men at Risk Change Sexual Behavior

New monkeypox cases in the United States and Europe are starting to decline as we head into September.

NBC News looked over the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and calculated a 40 percent decline in new cases since early August. Cases are also falling in countries like Germany and the Netherlands.

The eventual (and slow-walked) arrival of monkeypox vaccines did probably make a dent in the spread. More than 350,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered. As a reminder, though, the U.S. had more than 1 million doses of a vaccine available in storage in Denmark, but both bureaucratic red tape and indecisiveness on the part of the Department of Health and Humans Services kept them from being deployed quickly enough to stop monkeypox from spreading across the country.

Instead, NBC News notes, gay and bisexual men, once it became clear that sex was the primary source of the disease's spread, pulled back on risky behavior. Research from the CDC found a 50 percent drop in anonymous or random sex among these men, and 20 percent of the men they polled had gotten at least one dose of the monkeypox vaccine.