I'm seeing a lot of conspiratorial thinking on Twitter and elsewhere where people think it's just too suspicious that a new virus has popped up so soon after CO

I'm seeing a lot of conspiratorial thinking on Twitter and elsewhere where people think it's just too suspicious that a new virus has popped up so soon after COVID-19. If you're harboring these suspicions, it might be worth reading a little about the Poisson Distribution[1] and Frequency Illusion[2]. Because the appearance of an emerging disease isn't generally correlated to the appearance of another, different disease (big assumption here), there is no guarantee of even spacing. Furthermore, we've had over 30 emerging infection diseases pop up in the last 30 years[3]. They're much more likely to receive increased attention now however, due to heightened worldwide awareness of infectious disease from COVID-19. I'm not saying that there's definitely no conspiracy, but Occam's Razor says cognitive bias is a much more likely explanation for why monkeypox seems so oddly-timed than Bill Gates's secret world domination plan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618832/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618832/