Monkeypox Virtue Signaling Is NOT A Solution

Some African Doctors Advising WHO Are Less Than Impressed

It seems I’m not the only one who is distinctly unimpressed by the WHO’s blatant politicking and virtue signaling over monkeypox.

As I noted in my last article, the WHO has rather unceremoniously swept away some 1500 suspected cases of monkeypox in Africa, even as it ponders declaring monkeypox to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Even a cynic would be hard pressed to ignore the rather blatant bigotry in the WHO’s clumsy pandering to First World pandemic paranoia peddlers.

Moreover, why is monkeypox an international concern now and not earlier this year, when it was spreading just among the countries of Africa?

Given the WHO’s concerns about “stigma” and “discrimination” over the virus, one has to wonder why spread among Afican countries was not a matter of international concern but spread among European countries is.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical but arbitrarily memory-holing 1500 suspected cases of monkeypox within Africa sounds mighty discriminatory.

Apparently, I’m not the only one harboring such suspicions.

“If WHO was really worried about monkeypox spread, they could have convened their emergency committee years ago when it reemerged in Nigeria in 2017 and no one knew why we suddenly had hundreds of cases,” said Oyewale Tomori, a Nigerian virologist who sits on several WHO advisory groups. “It is a bit curious that WHO only called their experts when the disease showed up in white countries,” he said.

Once Again, The “Experts” Are Behind The Curve

While the WHO is being justifiably criticized for its obvious politicization of disease, researchers and the corporate media are slowly getting their brains around questions I raised last month about what was really taking place with the virus.

Has the monkeypox virus found a reservoir host outside of the currently known endemic region, expanding the parts of the globe where it is endemic?

Not only does answering this question have direct impact on mitigation strategies for the current outbreak, but also on the frequency and distribution of future outbreaks.

There is a distinct possibility monkeypox is no longer confined to West Africa and the Congo Basin, yet the corporate media has yet to explore this possibility.

Today the New York Times finally posed some of the same questions.

If the virus has adapted to include people as hosts, monkeypox outbreaks could become more frequent and more difficult to contain. That carries the risk that monkeypox could spill over from infected people into animals — most likely rodents — in countries outside Africa, which has struggled with that problem for decades. The virus may persist in infected animals, sporadically triggering new infections in people.

This comes on top of the Atlantic article I cited yesterday which pondered questions of endemicity even after describing how the 2003 US monkeypox outbreak involved prairie dogs as a viral reservoir host.

One lasting interspecies hop, akin to the one that SARS-CoV-2 has made into white-tailed deer, and monkeypox will be “with us forever” in the U.S., says Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute, in New York. In Central and West Africa, where the virus is endemic, scientists suspect that at least a couple of rodent species intermittently slosh it into humans. And as the largest-ever epidemic of monkeypox outside of Africa in history continues to unfurl—more than 2,700 confirmed and suspected cases have been reported across roughly three dozen countries—the virus is now getting plenty more shots on goal. This time, we may not get so lucky; the geography of monkeypox might soon change.

It has only taken the “experts” roughly a month to get comfortable with the reality clearly indicated by the data: Monkeypox is no longer endemic in just West and Central Africa. Western Europe also is almost certainly a permanent home for the virus.

The extant data is almost impossible to explain any other way, yet the “experts” have been wedded to almost every other explanation.

Once again, the corporate media is behind the curve.

Once again, the WHO is proven to be a corrupted organization less interested in disease control than in pandering to the politically well connected.

European Monkeypox Is Different From African Monkeypox

One fact the corporate media continues to struggle to articulate effectively is the prevalence of monkeypox cases among gay and bisexual men.

The spread among young men with genital ulcers was observed at least once before. In 2017, Nigeria recorded 228 suspected cases of monkeypox and confirmed 60. The virus spread primarily among young men who had genital ulcers.

Britain’s experience indicates how complicated it can be to trace contacts of a virus that may be sexually transmitted, especially in cases where infected people have had multiple anonymous partners. In an initial analysis of a subset of cases, officials said they were able to obtain names for fewer than one-third of the 78 reported sexual contacts.

However, the cited study in fact is far more hesitant to correlate cases of monkeypox to sexual activity during the 2017 Nigerian outbreak.

The clinical manifestations of human monkeypox have been shown to be influenced by the route of infection with animal source and complex invasive infections associated with more severe symptoms than person-to-person transmissions due to skin contact. [11,12] While the clinical findings in our study are like other studies [2,13,14], it is noteworthy that a substantial number of our cases who were young adults in their reproductive age presenting with genital ulcers, as well as concomitant syphilis and HIV infection. Although the role of sexual transmission of human monkeypox is not established, sexual transmission is plausible in some of these patients through close skin to skin contact during sexual intercourse or by transmission via genital secretions. The role of genital secretions in transmission of human monkeypox, however deserves further studies. Our findings also suggest that HIV-infection might negatively influence the morbidity of human monkeypox as patients with HIV had more severe skin lesions associated with genital ulcers as compared with HIV-negative individuals. Nigeria has a HIV prevalence of 3.4% while the prevalence in Bayelsa state is 2.7%.[15] In view of relative endemicity of HIV in Nigeria, the emergence of HIV-monkeypox coinfection and associated co-morbidities might pose significant clinical and public health challenges in the preventing and control of both diseases in Nigeria.

The earlier studies referenced as sharing similar clinical findings make no particular mention of sexual activity as a possible transmission vector, and having a “substantial number” of such cases in the 2017 outbreak is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the clear prevalance of such cases in the current outbreak beyond Africa.

Thus while genomic evidence shows clear links between the cases spreading particularly in Europe and the 2017 Nigerian outbreak, the concentration of cases within a singular patient demographic is part of understanding the evolution of the virus as it has spread from Africa to apparently become endemic within Europe as well.

The media is struggling to conform depictions of the current monkeypox outbreak globally to prior outbreaks confined to West Africa, even as evidence continues to mount that the global outbreak is not the same as earlier African outbreaks. For reasons that are unfathomable and defy all logic, the media simply does not want to accept the very possibility which it cannot avoid reporting: monkeypox is no longer just in Africa and is no longer primarily a zoonotic infection.

Virtue Signaling Is Not Science. Neither Is It Journalism

The very explicit desire of both the media and the WHO to avoid characterizing monkeypox as a “gay disease”, while hitting all the right virtue-signaling buttons for political correctness, is perversely complicating the challenge of addressing the spread of monkeypox among gay and bisexual men. By seeking to rewrite the history of earlier outbreaks to make them appear more like the current global outbreak, the corporate media in particular are guilty of obscuring significant details regarding the evolution of the virus, in particular regarding how the virus can be transmitted.

Whether monkeypox should be apprehended as a sexually transmitted disease is a question rather beyond the scope of what can be clearly derived from the extant data. At the same time, that a majority of cases do involve gay and bisexual men indicates that sexual activity is at the very least facilitating the spread of the disease. Pretending this is not the case so as not to offend the sensibilities of that same demographic will do nothing to help educate those within that demographic on how best to protect themselves from infection.

It is not a “stigma” to counsel people to exercise caution in their sexual interactions with others; it is common sense.

Such caution might not prevent all human-to-human transmission of monkeypox, but it at the very least might be a non-invasive, non-toxic, non-lethal means of slowing that transmission down and limiting the spread of the disease.

Dodging such issues and questions because they are awkward or uncomfortable might be politically correct. It may even make some people feel less awkward about their risks of catching the disease for a time. However, the momentary gratifications of such a virtue signaling response will not change those risks, nor the patient demographics to whom those risks most apply.

Such virtue signaling can never take the place of true scientific discussion and inquiry. It also cannot serve as a substitute for responsible journalism.

People need and deserve serious scientific discussion and inquiry into the nature of all communicable disease. People also need and deserve responsible journalism about communicable disease. Right now, they are getting neither.