The last outbreak was not contained. Prior to 2022, there was no sustained transmission outside of central Africa. The 2022 outbreak saw significant transmission all over the world. There were 30,000 confirmed cases and 42 deaths in the US alone.
Just because something isn’t extremely contagious right now doesn’t mean it can’t become a pandemic. A virus can will mutate, it can go unnoticed, etc. As it stands, mpox can be transmitted by respiratory droplets.
Smallpox was a related virus. It too was transmissible through close contact with other people. It killed 300 million people in the 20th century. While vaccination is likely going to prevent mpox from becoming anywhere close to that deadly, I’d rather not play with fire. Don’t ignore a nasty virus.
According to the state salary database, there are about 3 dozen UW employees who make more than $500,000 a year in 2022 (the most recent year published). A few are administrative staff, many are coaches for sports (which is very dumb), and a few are professors.
Their total salaries sum to $32 million, which is a lot. But when you divide that across the total number of students, it comes out to about $580 per student per year. So even if you stopped paying these people, tuition would only go down about 5%.
That’s assuming that these staff members don’t bring any value, which is not a good assumption. Many of these highly paid people would be highly compensated in this private sector–for example the manager of UW’s investments makes $1 million per year–so rightly or wrongly, the university must pay very high to retain them.
As I said before, the university has received $400 million less from the state (adjusted for inflation) today than it did in the 1980s. The expense of highly paid staff is a drop in the bucket compared to the drop in state funding.