That's what I said out loud — just because I wanted to blurt something out — after reading the NYT headline "What Happened to Monkeypox?"
I'm reading the article now, and I see that it's not about the political use of this disease. It's about how the cases are declining — down 85% since August, we're told.
"Experts" cite 4 factors:
First, vaccines helped slow the virus’s spread (despite a rocky rollout). Second, gay and bisexual men reduced activities.... The third reason is related: the Pride Month effect...
That is, apparently, during Pride Month (June), gay men had "more parties and other festivities [that] involved casual sex.
The fourth factor, experts tell us, is that a disease that spreads through close contact is "harder to transmit" and therefore "self-limiting virus."
So what do you think of my knee-jerk, it's-all-politics answer? Was I just amusing myself, imitating a cynic?
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63 comments:
I think you're mostly right. Monkeypox came along when large numbers of people decided they weren't going to worry about COVID anymore and the powers that be weren't ready to lose this particular tool yet.
But in the end, the gay sex angle ruined Monkeypox as the next big thing and they had to give it up.
Transgender/homosexual trends in back... black holes... whores h/t NAACP, with pathogenic right of way (i.e. digestive intercourse)... AIDS, Covid-19/20/21/22, Monkeypox, too in socially liberal climates.
That said, think of the pride parade with lionesses tending to cubs playing in gay revelry.
All those factors regarding Monkeypox were there in the beginning. It was the media that made this into a political thing. By denying those factors endemic to the disease when discussing it.
They made my elderly widowed mother-in-law worry she was going to get monkeypox.
So, basically all those evil right-wingers who suggested that the population most prone to infection (gay and bisexual men) reduce sexual activity were correct? Because I'm old enough to remember when suggesting that earlier this year brought condemnation heaped upon one's head. How dare we suggest that gay men behave in a responsible way in order to protect their health!
Correct.
5th there really Aren't ALL That Many sexually promiscuous gay men in the country..
Now that Most guys that go to orgies have gotten it; there's no where for it to go
Pretty clearly you were right - the media isn't interested in pursuing the truth, or in actually being helpful, just in pushing their agenda. Another example - virtually no coverage that the most recent studies are showing that being very wary of the Covid vaccines, especially for certain demographics, was absolutely the correct approach.
Two years of COVID anxiety primed media/governments for a knee-jerk reaction. Plus, "monkeypox" sounded very strange and frightening to many. "Was this caused by the COVID vaccines?" some asked.
About 50 years of gay tolerance / alternative sexuality politics made it impossible to criticize the fully known and documented class of disease spreaders.
Biology is genuine science and biology cannot be denied, under penalty of death and extinction. Random sex with strangers spreads disease. This wasn't news 500 years ago with the rise of face-rotting syphilis in Europe. It wasn't news 50 years ago in San Francisco's gay bathhouses and the rise of HIV/AIDS.
Political denials mainly serve to speed the transition to another party or a functional ideology.
"But in the end, the gay sex angle"
Tongue in cheek, right?
You are not wrong.
When a disease is deadly, or even just significantly debilitating, people modify their behaviors naturally.
When will do the “experts” admit they were massively, completely and horribly wrong?
My question is what was the need? With Covid, they shutdown a roaring economy to make the sitting President look bad. With monkeypox, they went out of their way not to demand the gay community social distance themselves or outright cancel Pride Month celebrations to avoid spread of the disease. So what is the cynic’s view on political value of the disease?
A theme? To beat monkeypox, love actually.
4 of the 4 factors can be replaced by one explanation: It's a sexually transmitted disease, so once people heard about it, they could adjust their behavior, and they did
Heinlein used to describe STDs as diseases that were so incredibly hard to catch that they required the most intimate contact. First time I read that and realized he was right was mentally liberating: all my life since the onset of puberty, I'd been urged to fear these diseases, and suddenly I realized I didn't have to any more, since my "most intimate contact" activities were governed by other factors that would naturally protect me.
AIDS came along, and the drumbeat of "it's an epidemic that will hit ALL DEMOGRAPHICS" was so overwhelmingly loud that I felt the fear creeping back. But years and years went by without epidemic AIDS in the straight and non-drug-using population, and eventually I realized - again - that Heinlein had been right and I was effectively behaviorally immune to AIDS.
When monkeypox came around, I had finally learned my lesson. I haven't wasted a moment's thought on it.
But was it something seized on for political use - of course. Until the embarrassment of having to admit that most people don't behave like promiscuous gay men made it a political liability. The Pride Month effect indeed - how unfortunate for gay people that there is that (vocal and out and especially Proud) subset of them who have polluted the concept of "gay pride" to the point where everyone who hears the term knows it's a euphemism for "license to have public, non-P-in-V sex with multiple partners you don't know."
The trial balloon did a Hindenburg...
Gilbar is right too.
Ann, does your behavioral explanation apply to AIDS? I don't think so.
""They just needed a disease and they don't need it anymore.""
It is the NYT's.
Everything the NYT's prints if focused on people they need to keep in the herd.
They don't want too many more sheep wandering off.
Why do you keep supporting something like this?
Ann Althouse said...4 of the 4 factors can be replaced by one explanation: It's a sexually transmitted disease, so once people heard about it, they could adjust their behavior, and they did
True, but to focus on your "it's all politics" assertion, the fact that it turned out to be a gay STD is key. The fact that it largely went away when Gay Pride Month ended is less important.
exhelodrvr1 said..."But in the end, the gay sex angle"
Tongue in cheek, right?
In context, "tongue in cheek" sounds dirtier. Gross, even.
Come election day, "they" may find that they needed it after all.
Orgy season ends when the weather gets cold.
Fetish gear goes in the closet when the winter coats come out.
Admittedly, this may not apply in California.
Or another explanation I have heard is that children started getting it.
If it is almost exclusively in men (see linked chart) and is sexually transmitted, how do 11-15 year get it?
Unless there is some non-sexual transmission method, this is not a good look for the gay community. So of course it had to be scrubbed from the news before radical Maga conspiracy extremists started making making a connection.
Cause or coincidence doesn't matter. It reinforces the groomer narrative. We can't have that, can we?
15 cases 0-5 years old
8 cases 6-10
10 cases 11-15
Interesting that cdc, allegedly a "science" organization, lists data by men, women, tg men and tg women and "another sex/gender". I'd be interested in cdc's science behind the idea that there is "another sex/gender"
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/demographics.html
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
The instinctive reaction was pretty correct based on the bullshit statements of Fauci and the CDC. The fascist Biden admin wants to and has kept the “emergency” status for as long as possible. After all the unnecessary emergency allowed them to fix the last election and courts blessed the illegalities because “emergency” so yeah they weren’t about to let a crisis go to waste. Fauci had even tried his old AIDS game plan weakly suggesting monkey pox would jump to the hetero community. Embrace the skepticism Althouse. I would not even call it knee jerk. I’d say the current state of public health demands such caution.
Finally, straight answers to all of our questions about monkeypox...
major political party wants to show concern for & garner support from a crucial identity tribe. now, virtue having been signaled, it's time to move on to another identity tribe...
cynicism not unwarranted
Something else odd about the chart
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/demographics.html
It shows zero cases in the 0-5 year old age group when the table shows 15 cases.
The chart omits the 6-10 age group completely while the table shows 8 cases
But we should trust the CDC.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
I think you're spot-on. Not even two months ago the narrative was "Well, we just have to live with Monkeypox now." And today... this.
Media sells fear and misinformation...news at eleven.
...
For all the talk of controlling or censoring misinformation/disinformation over the last few years, the reality is that if such rules applied to mainstream media they'd be suspended/banned from their practices on an almost constant basis.
Here's the money quote from the article:
"Another factor worth emphasizing: public health communication. During Covid, officials have sometimes given unclear or misleading guidance because they did not trust the public with the truth.
A similar phenomenon played out with monkeypox. Some officials were cautious about explicitly labeling monkeypox as a greater risk to gay and bisexual men and asking them to reduce risky sexual activities, out of fear of stigmatizing a population that already faces discrimination over AIDS."
The author said the quiet part out loud.
It also didn't help the "marketing" that it was described as being spread primarily by gay sex, and then kids started getting it. Connecting those dots would make gays look bad.
Monkeypox cases reported biweekly to October 12.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/mpx-trends.html
It is down from a peak of about 566 on August 15 in July but was still about 111 on October 11 (and 60 on October 12)
Ann is probably right, gays are changing behaviors. But we don't necessarily know why. Fear of disease or something else.
But if the NYT doesn't discuss monkeypox perhaps it doesn't exist at all. And that may be the most important thing. (protect the narrative)
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
"So what do you think of my knee-jerk, it's-all-politics answer?"
I think you're learning. Or just letting your natural inclinations come out. Althouse Unfiltered. I wouldn't say hotheaded though.
"Was I just amusing myself, imitating a cynic?"
You tell us. But you say that as if it's a bad thing. Consider how much more amusing being a real cynic would be.
But yes, it's all politics. Except that in any one moment, the PTB don't always assess correctly how to play the politics. They calculate, and they calculate with the same preferences in mind, but they don't always calculate right.
But why exactly, in this age of LGBTQ+ acceptance and anything-goes sexuality, should there be such lingering prog sensitivity about associating monkeypox with gay sex? Not giving culture-war ammo to deplorables isn't the entire answer.
Monkey Pox filled the fundamental need that Liberals have to find something to be mortally afraid of every moment of their lives. Unfortunately, it was a poor substitue for Covid because most of us are not homosexual males. So now they are in search of the next great fear.
Ive noticed that Climate Change seems to be ramping up lately with even sillier claims about how and when we are all about to die. Maybe that will fill the gap for awhile. But it rarely cracks the top ten list of things normal people are concerned about. Too many of us are on to the scam.
So what comes next? I don't know. I find it hard to think like a Lefty.
4 of the 4 factors can be replaced by one explanation: It's a sexually transmitted disease, so once people heard about it, they could adjust their behavior, and they did.
Which makes the earlier denials that it was an STD by health "experts" and the media a blatantly politicized response, one that endangered public health. So you're initial reaction, whatever the specific motive, was warranted.
Thinking about HIV, we can only conclude that fear of a nationwide, all demographic epidemic was an early example of what we just went through with COVID-19 ("Everyone is going to die from this if you don't do what we say!"). In fact, many of the same people that stoked the HIV fear in the general population in the '80s are still at it. (I'm looking at you, Fauci.) Was there a genuine risk of transmission across all demographics? Who knows, but certain sexual practices certainly enhanced the risk (compare HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa to the US and Europe). Ultimately, successful therapies have controlled the consequences.
The bottom line (sorry) seems to be that HIV and monkeypox transmission declined rapidly as information got out about safe sexual practices. The politics gummed up that message on HIV. Successful therapies controlled the disease.
Government by fearful speculation is not government. It is manipulation by propaganda.
We should all ask ourselves whether it was good to eliminate all public discussion of therapies (in favor of an experimental vaccination program that was way over-sold) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some say it was when the Monkey pox began to be reported in adolescents, the "epidemic" silently went away. But hey it is the NYT soothing the libs as usual. They're known for accurate reporting. They have the data right handy.
This was from a week ago: How Serious Is Monkeypox?
You'd have to get deep into that article before you discovered that monkeypox largely affects gay men.
Doctor: "Monkeypox primarily seems to be affecting gay people, we're not sure why yet."
Reporter: "A strange new disease is out there, affecting people, all people, equally, could get you too. Be afraid, be very afraid."
Woke people don't want to stigmatize, they're terrified of being called some kind bad word.
"The fascist Biden admin wants to and has kept the 'emergency' status for as long as possible."
Here in Illinois, we are still in a state of emergency, even though the Illinois Department of public health has stopped releasing daily COVID case reports because there is not much to report.
The appalling JB Pritzker was just endorsed for reelection by the equally appalling Chicago Tribune based in part on his response to COVID-19. I guess the Trib likes government by executive decree.
"4 of the 4 factors can be replaced by one explanation"
I meant to write "3 of the 4 factors can be replaced by one explanation."
Sorry!
While pathogenic transmission through digestive intercourse is a primary vector, particularly through the back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP, it is socially liberal behavior that endangers couples and couplets alike with forward-looking risk.
officials have sometimes given unclear or misleading guidance because they did not trust the public with the truth
Bias is intrinsic. Prejudice is progressive. Transphobia is real, thus the labels, parades, and acrobatics to normalize an apartheid regime in the Pride and Rainbow community. Homophobia is truth spoken through projection.
Here's the problem with being in woke world, in a nutshell. Sensitivity is far more important than truth. You don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. So truth is repressed.
Somebody in power decides that "this is the truth that we're releasing today." So then all of these "sensitive" people become kind of monstrous to the people who are not getting with the program.
So, for instance, if you're going to two orgies a day, not wearing a condom, what do woke people say about that? Nothing! That's fine. "Have fun at the orgy! You dog."
But what if you're not vaccinating for COVID? They scream at you. "You're anti-science! You'll kill us all!" They'll report you to HR for not wearing a mask on a Zoom call.
Smart people can do this. It's smart people who are castrating 6-year-olds because they said, "I'm a girl." It's highly educated people who are stabbing babies for money.
So if more and more medical schools go woke, this will become a bigger and bigger problem.
California Department of Public Health says this: While MPX can infect anyone, many of the recent cases in 2022 have occurred among persons self-identifying as men who have sex with men (MSM).
I did not actually know that gay men are now called "persons self-identifying as men who have sex with men (MSM)."
Whenever people are changing names around, your politic alarms should be going DEFCON 5. "Wait, wait, wait, why did my baby just become a fetus?" Anyway, right now the MSM is deciding whether or not they can mention that monkeypox is dangerous for the MSM. It's entirely possible in the future the woke media will just say, "monkeypox can infect anyone" and just leave it at that.
It is down from a peak of about 566 on August 15 in July but was still about 111 on October 11 (and 60 on October 12
Dunno why I said about there. Sloppy of me.
566,111,and 60 are exact numbers from the table.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
If you get your news from tainted organizations, you're always going to be left reading tea leaves.
Isn't it much better to just cancel your New York Times subscription?
Monkeypox was used as a political tool. It's still being used that way. Gays don't like it when you report that they're spreading their filth and disease amongst children via raping them. So voila, the New York Times announces that this disease is gone. It can't be used for politics, so it's gone.
Poof.
If you get your news from tainted organizations, you're always going to be left reading tea leaves.
Isn't it much better to just cancel your New York Times subscription?
Monkeypox was used as a political tool. It's still being used that way. Gays don't like it when you report that they're spreading their filth and disease amongst children via raping them. So voila, the New York Times announces that this disease is gone. It can't be used for politics, so it's gone.
Poof.
Covid is still the get democrats elected virus. Get Fauci and the big pharma insiders - rich - virus.
University of Minnesota medical school has an oath for doctors
(not the Hippocratic Oath, obviously)
"Our institution is located on Dakota land…We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system."
"We recognize the inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism, and all other forms of oppression..."
You were right. I'd say that Covid mutated and so did fear of Covid which has become healthy skepticism inoculating us against fear-spreading by public health officials. It's the story of Sunset Boulevard - they want to be celebrities again and we're tired of them and tired of the machine that turns out celebrities 24/7. We hear the mechanism cranking; we see the old-style special effects and laugh at the monster.
So what do you think of my knee-jerk, it's-all-politics answer? Was I just amusing myself, imitating a cynic?
I don’t see how a person can observe politics, and the actions of the federal government, in the back to back eras of NeverTrump and Joe Biden, and not be cynical. If you aren’t cynical then you must not be paying attention.
I think they needed a disease and were surprised at how cynical the public voice had become, and how swift the reaction was. Nobody was willing to put up with the b*llshit of being told they must be terrified and vaccinate their children for Monkey Pox when they knew straight away that it was the kind of disease that was only going to spread via gay orgies. The High Priests of Public Health dropped it like a hot potato when they realized how badly it was received.
"The just needed a disease and they don't need it anymore".
Probably very close to right. I think they really needed a victory. COVID hasn't played well with the enormous public health initiative. Monkeypox was a known entity which could reasonably be expected to go nowhere.
"Experts" said, "First, vaccines helped slow the virus’s spread (despite a rocky rollout)..." See? We really can make vaccines that work!
Besides, with Monkeypox cases dropping like rocks, they can't credibly sustain the fear porn. Might as well claim success and downplay future risk. Wisely, they don't seem to be crowing much. Oh, if only COVID had been this easy!
I suppose what you really believe is for you to know and for us to ponder.
I also agree with other posters who note that it's not good politics to fret too much over a disease so strongly and clearly connected to gay sex.
My comment at 9:12, I didn't mean to give the impression those are quotes from the article.
I was trying to paraphrase the attitudes of ordinary doctor and a woke reporter.
The NYT article is actually pretty good, I think. She even mentions the conflict about whether or not to report this information.
For other woke people, you don't mention the conflict, you just remove the facts.
Writers often frame a narrative, and there's a tendency (in all of us) to exclude facts that hurt your thesis. You need pushback from editors and other people. And you're going to have less and less of that pushback as your newsrooms, and faculty lounges, are 90% Democrats.
In fact I think the Democrats accidentally created a new political party, the Woke party, that is swallowing up their old party.
Dr. Frankenstein: Democrat party
Monster: Woke party
Darkisland, good catch.
If you click the "download data" button and open the spreadsheet the first entry in the data column runs in fives (5-10-15, etc) and that shows up in the data table but not the chart.
Beats me what that means.
"In an online survey of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men conducted during August 5-15, 2022, respondents reported changing their behavior because of the monkeypox outbreak: 48% reported reducing their number of sex partners, 50% reported reducing one-time sexual encounters, and 50% reported reducing sex with partners met on dating apps or at sex venues."
- CDC
Xlnt news. Just keep avoiding those festering contagious monkeypox lesions that can appear on any part of your buddy's body.
We did not need a Michael Fumento--The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS--to deep-six monkeypox. Considering it had everything needed for an AIDS-like national panic, what's the diff? I think the infected kids were the key.
There's also the fact that the disease isn't fatal or permanently crippling.
Keep in mind that the COVID-19 nonsense is falling apart - quickly. The FL Surgeon General just announced that males below maybe 30 shouldn’t get the mRNA jab. Just too dangerous, for no perceivable benefit. Countries across Europe are doing similarly. Turns out that those vaccines should never have been approved for EUA use in the first place - they were inadequately tested (for example, they were never tested for residual mRNA or spike proteins days, if not weeks or months after the jab - which would have negated their claim to safety), and recorded side effects during the trials were either ignored or suppressed (by, for example, removing subjects from the test population). The only thing that the Boosters have done is to massively trigger immune systems to fight the spike proteins from the original variants produced by the mRNA in the vaccines - they do no good against Omicron, because it has different spike proteins (100% vaccine mismatch). Boosted immune systems are fighting the vaccine, and not the virus. Meanwhile the FDA has denied permission to vaccinate with the very successful Indian deactivated full virus vaccine because it isn’t needed, or some such.
No surprise that our trust in our public health bureaucrats has plummeted to new lows, thanks to their gross mismanagement of COVID-19.
Second, gay and bisexual men reduced activities.... The third reason is related: the Pride Month effect...
That is, apparently, during Pride Month (June), gay men had "more parties and other festivities [that] involved casual sex.
So, in other words:
The Republican response to Monkeypox: "tell gay / bi men to stop having lots of unprotected sex" was the correct response, and the "public health experts" response of "tell everyone they're at equal risk, and say nothing about cutting out unprotected sex" got thousands of people infected.
Or, tl;dr: Never trust "public health experts "
So what do you think of my knee-jerk, it's-all-politics answer? Was I just amusing myself, imitating a cynic?
Well, the spread was driven by left wing politics. Whether that was because they wanted a "scary disease", or because left wing politics is just inherently inhumane, will be left as an exercise for the reader
I've a friend since law school who is a complete Anglophile. She's had a lot of adversity in her life (for instance, cancer at age 30 and a cheat for a husband) but this June was FINALLY going to fulfill a life-long dream and travel to England with a friend.
They cancelled at the last minute because strikes threatened and they didn't want to be stuck in airports whilst Monkeypox was slathered about. I fear she will never have another chance.
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