06/05/2022 / By Cassie B.
It wasn’t that long ago that the mainstream media was filled with stories about a scary new virus that was poised to become the new COVID-19. Cases of monkeypox, they said, were suddenly spiking, and the small possibility of spreading it through respiratory droplets had mask and vaccine makers seeing dollar signs.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that its sudden appearance across several countries is a sign the virus has likely been spreading undetected for quite some time outside of the areas where it usually found in Africa. The disease is marked by prominent infectious lesions and begins with flu-like symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, chills, headache and exhaustion, as well as swollen lymph nodes.
At first, it seemed the media was ready to help its Big Pharma sponsors and scare everyone into thinking we were all going to catch monkeypox just by walking down the street. With any luck, they’d convince the world to start lining up for another new vaccine to keep the risk of the virus at bay. So why has the fear porn suddenly come to a stop?
It turns out that most of the cases of the virus have been reported by men seeking care at sexual health clinics after having sex with other men and developing symptoms. In other words, if you are not a man who has sex with other men, your risk appears to be quite low. And by talking about the virus as something undesirable, it could stigmatize gay people, and that would get the social justice warriors out in droves trying to cancel everyone.
Many of the stories about the disease in the media fail to mention that the current outbreak has been linked to two major gay sex parties in Europe. Some media outlets, like NBC News, have described them using less loaded terms like “raves.” One was actually a Gay Pride event held in Spain’s Canary Islands that attracted 80,000 people, and the other was a large-scale gay fetish festival held in Belgium known as the Darklands Festival.
Although experts warn that the disease can also be spread through close physical contact with people who have lesions, the signs are so obvious that it should be fairly easy to avoid. But there’s another reason this virus isn’t sending people into panic mode, not even those who do fall into the high-risk group: it isn’t particularly deadly.
In fact, so far, no deaths have been reported from the outbreaks being seen in Europe and North America. Although people do die from it in Africa every year, experts say that they are mostly individuals who do not have access to healthcare.
The disease usually clears up on its own and only lasts a couple of weeks, and most cases are mild. While it can be very uncomfortable to experience, it is nowhere near as threatening as COVID-19 was in its early days.
Even the World Health Organization has acknowledged that there is no need to panic. Their top monkeypox expert, Dr. Rosamund Lewis, said this week: “At the moment, we are not concerned about a global pandemic – that word would need to be defined in the context of an orthopox virus – however we are concerned that individuals may acquire this virus through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information they need to protect themselves.”
It’s pretty clear that those who profited off COVID-19 are now clamoring to find the next pandemic to scare people with, but the element of gay sex transmission involved in monkeypox appears to be keeping the media from creating a global panic. However, it probably won’t be long before they come up with a different disease with “pandemic potential” to frighten the masses.
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covid-19, Fact Check, gay sex, infections, journalism, mainstream media, monkeypox, outbreak, pandemic, virus
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