By Matt Lamb
Article Source
The Biden administration announced on Friday that it had ordered an additional 500,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine to add to the 372,000 already purchased by federal officials.
“As of Friday, the U.S. had identified 45 cases in 15 states and the District of Columbia,” the Associated Press reported. “More than 1,300 cases have been found in about 30 other countries outside the areas of Africa where the virus is endemic.”
The disease is primarily spread through close contact, often between homosexual men although the AP downplayed that risk in its reporting.
“Last month, cases began emerging in Europe and the United States,” the AP reported. “Many — but not all — of those who contracted the virus had traveled internationally. Most were men who have sex with men, but health officials stress that anyone can get monkeypox.”
The new fear of monkeypox has raised questions about what public health officials knew about the disease before it became public. For example, on April 21 Canadian health officials ordered 500,000 doses of a smallpox vaccine, which reportedly can be used against monkeypox. However, the first monkeypox cases were not announced until May 13.
Attorney Michael Senger wrote an article for the Brownstone Institute in which he noted that the “world’s first-ever global outbreak of Monkeypox” is occurring “just one year after an international biosecurity conference in Munich held a simulation of a ‘global pandemic involving an unusual strain of Monkeypox’ beginning in mid-May 2022.”
“The global Monkeypox outbreak — occurring on the exact timeline predicted by a biosecurity simulation of a global Monkeypox outbreak a year prior — bears a striking resemblance to the outbreak of COVID-19 just months after Event 201, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic almost exactly like COVID-19,” Senger wrote.
Meanwhile, a historian of infectious diseases says that homosexual men like himself need to be warned about the risk of monkeypox.
“I worry that public-health leaders are not doing enough to directly alert men who have sex with men about monkeypox,” Professor Jim Downs at Gettysburg College wrote on May 28. “Gay men are not the only people at risk, but they do need to know that, right now, the condition appears to be spreading most actively within their community.”
He argued in The Atlantic, a left-leaning magazine, that “public-health agencies should also press gay social-media apps and other online platforms to tell their users that men who have sex with men have been disproportionately infected by the virus.”
“[M[onkeypox doesn’t require sexual contact but is prone to spread in situations where people with exposed skin are together in close quarters,” he wrote.