Review 2: "A Peer-Educator Driven Approach for Sampling Populations at Increased Mpox Risk in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Implications for Surveillance and Response"

RR\ID Evidence Scale rating by reviewer:

• Strong. The main study claims are very well-justified by the data and analytic methods used. There is little room for doubt that the study produced has very similar results and conclusions as compared with the hypothetical ideal study. The study’s main claims should be considered conclusive and actionable without reservation.

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Review: This is an interesting description of various methods for recruiting persons believed to be at high risk for mpox in Democratic Republic of the Congo. Peer educators were by far the dominant form of recruitment. The authors do not conclude that other forms are not worth attempting, but the results would seem to justify such a conclusion. It would be helpful if the authors addressed this point.

The biggest unaddressed limitation of the paper is the failure to address variation in peer educator recruitment. What was the distribution of numbers of recruited participants across the peer educations. Did the numbers of recruited participants approximate a normal distribution? Or were there a small number of peers who recruited the great majority of participants? Did the distribution of recruitment vary across the three cities? 

While we are clearly very far from weighting starfish recruiting to approximate a "representative" sample, information on the distribution of recruits by different peer educators, might provide some insight into possible biases in this sampling method.