Biden seems to want monkeypox to be the next pandemic

The world population checks in at just a little under 7.9 billion people. Of that number, Europe has identified 100 cases of monkeypox and the United States has identified…two cases (out of a population of roughly 330 million people). Nevertheless, Joe Biden is already hard at work ratcheting up the fear. Based on the information available, though, we probably don’t need to worry and this should not turn into a government power grab, complete with election control.

Preliminarily, Dr. Robert Malone has written a great post about monkeypox (“Truth versus Fearporn”), from which I’ve gleaned a lot of my facts about the disease. Let’s start with what monkeypox is: It’s a variola virus that is related to smallpox, as well as to cowpox (which led to Edward Jenner inventing the first true vaccination), and other animal poxes. Like the animal poxes, it’s not very serious for humans.

Essentially, as cowpox did to those long ago milkmaids, monkeypox makes people have the same symptoms as smallpox, only more mildly. The illness is also contagious only through person-to-person contact, which means that classic quarantining and contact tracing work to stop its spread. Symptomatic people are isolated while health agencies find their contacts, and that’s kind of the end of it. No lockdowns and changes to voting required.

Further lowering the risk of monkeypox is the fact that it’s a double-stranded DNA virus. Those double strands slow mutations, which means that immunity, once acquired is good for a long, long time. Those who have been vaccinated against, or had, any of the other poxes, are almost certainly resistant to monkeypox.

It’s also not a very infectious disease for humans, although it obviously has a zoonotic element. You probably didn’t even notice a monkeypox outbreak in the U.S. in 2003. It was no biggie, probably because the establishment hadn’t yet discovered the political benefits of virus fear porn.

Image: Monkeypox under an electron microscope. Public domain.

So far, this outbreak of monkeypox seems to have spread through people who attended a huge gay pride festival in Gran Canary. The virus does not appear to have traveled through sexual contact; instead, the vector was a lot of lightly clothed people in close proximity to each other.

Dr. Malone is very clear that there is no need for panic in this case:

In my opinion, based on currently available information, Monkeypox is a virus and disease which is endemic in Africa, emerges sporadically after transmission into humans from animal hosts, and is typically spread by close human contact. It is readily controlled by classical public health measures. It does not have a high mortality rate. Unless there has been some genetic alteration, either through evolution or intentional genetic manipulation, it is not a significant biothreat, and has never been considered a high threat pathogen in the past.

Of course, facts have never stopped Joe Biden. Instead, he’s doing his best to stir up panic amongst those who take what he says seriously:

President Joe Biden said Sunday the new monkeypox outbreak should concern “everybody,” as it continues to baffle medical officials around the world.

“Everybody should be concerned about [it],” Biden said in South Korea, while speaking with a group of reporters before he boarded Air Force One for Japan, Reuters reported.

The president’s remarks come as numerous outbreaks of monkeypox were reported in Africa, followed by other reported cases in Europe and the U.S.

We’re working on it, hard to figure out what we do,” added Biden.

Again, there are currently two cases of a slow-moving, familiar disease in a population of 330 million people. Pardon me if I don’t run around screaming and demanding that I immediately get a smallpox vaccination (which will work against monkeypox).

The scariest thing about monkeypox appearing now is that its current emergence from Africa coincides with the Biden administration’s plan to hand to the World Health Organization, an utterly corrupt, ineffectual organization that’s in bed with China, control over American medicine in the case of a “health emergency.” If Biden is setting the bar so low, it’s entirely possible that, very soon, the WHO will be announcing that all Americans must “shelter in place” for the foreseeable future, and certainly until after November 8.