Monkeypox Hype

It looks like we're back to the political conundrum of the early 1980s with the spread of AIDS. It was recognized that AIDS was a disease spread almost entirely through sexual contact, and beyond that, it was spread via promiscuous sexual contact among gay males. This reflected badly on gays, especially when the discussion focused on institutions like bath houses and unsanitary things that went on there. On the other hand, gays argued that if the government didn't make finding a cure and vaccines a priority, this discriminated against gays.

Thus there was a media-driven messsage that AIDS wasn't a gay disease, anyone could catch it, although the circumstances advanced to prove this were limited to cases like contaminated blood in transfusions. Nevertheless, I remember consternation at my then Episcopalian parish about whether it could be transmitted via the communion vessels. This sort of public hysteria advanced the interests of the gay lobby, but it also advanced the interest of the public health establishment in creating a more general attitude that epidemics should be the cause of panic.

So we move forward 40 years to Monkeypox, which is clearly being advanced in the media as the next big epidemic. Thus via CBS News:

Clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases — already struggling to contain an explosive increase in infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea — now find themselves on the front lines in the nation’s fight to control the rapidly growing monkeypox outbreak.

After decades of underfunding and 2½ years into a pandemic that severely disrupted care, clinic staffers and public health officials say the clinics are ill-equipped for yet another epidemic.

“America does not have what it needs to adequately and totally fight monkeypox,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “We are already stretched to capacity.”

Note the words "struggling . . . on the front lines in the nation's fight" blah blah blah. It's World War II! The whole nation is struggling! Dr Scott Gottlieb furthers the narrative on Face the Nation:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Give us a sense of the scale of this because the CDC numbers are out. They say they're only eight women within that. No children. You're saying this is a pandemic? That's not a word the administration is using yet, what level of emergency are we at?

DR. GOTTLIEB: Yeah look, and I think they're going to be reluctant to use the word pandemic, because it implies that they've failed to contain this. And I think at this point, we've failed to contain this. . . . I think the window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed, and if it hasn't closed, it's certainly starting to close. 11,000 cases across the world right now. 1,800 cases, as you said, in the US. We're probably detecting just a fraction of the actual cases because we have a very, we had for a long time a very narrow case definition on who got tested. And by and large, we're looking in the community of men who have sex with men and STD clinics. So we're looking there, we're finding cases there. But it's a fact that there's cases outside that community right now. We're not picking them up, because we're not looking there. This has spread more broadly in the community. I wouldn't be surprised there's thousands of cases right now.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It's a little chilling to hear you say containment has failed. I've heard you say that before with COVID.

DR. GOTTLIEB: Well look, this isn't going to explode like COVID. This is a slower moving virus, which is why we could have gotten control of this if we had been more aggressive up front, and we made a lot of the same mistakes that we made with COVID with this - having a very narrow case definition not having enough testing early enough, not deploying vaccine in an aggressive fact- fashion to ring vaccinate. But now this is firmly embedded in the community.

So the narrative is being shaped -- it's already out of control. Well, maybe not as bad as COVID, but it's gonna be like COVID! We haven't been doing enough! It's probably too late! And of course, this isn't just gay men, it's just that we haven't tested enough straights and women! Just wait! It's embedded in the community!

Again, as with AIDS, two groups benefit from this narrative. The first is the public health establishment, which has benefited enormously in both funding and prestige from driving public policy in the COVID pandemic, and it would like to continue to do this. The second group is the gay lobby, which secures priority for public health spending on diseases that spread primarily among men who have promiscuous sex with men. This is done in some measure by making misleading claims about how such diseases aren't sexually transmitted, and that anyone can catch them.

Thus the reaction is predictable:

Demonstrators in San Francisco protested Monday against what they called the federal government’s “failure” to provide enough monkeypox vaccine to prevent the outbreak from becoming a major problem, particularly in the gay community.

The disease, which is transmitted through prolonged and intense physical contact, often results in a fever and in unsightly blisters. It is rarely fatal, but is uncomfortable and can last for several weeks.

. . . Demonstrators in San Francisco were concerned that the Biden administration had failed to provide enough vaccines to prevent the monkeypox virus from becoming endemic within the community, noting that a vaccine had been developed in 2019 but was then “ignored.”