Joe Biden has said that the spread of monkeypox, a disease related to smallpox, is something to be concerned about. New York Post. Biden said he hadn't been told the level of exposure of the disease. He also did not seem to realize that we had effective vaccines against monkeypox, including the original smallpox vaccine. There have only been 92 cases of the disease globally since the outbreak started. The virus is related to smallpox but is dramatically less dangerous, though people can occasionally die from it.
My Comment:
I've been rolling my eyes at this outbreak since it began. I am not scared of monkeypox. Original smallpox? Sure, that was a scary disease. But monkeypox is for the most part not. There is a more dangerous strain that kills up to 10% of infected, but this strain is not the same one. It appears to be the dramatically less virulent strain which kills less than 1% of infected.
Monkeypox also does not spread anywhere near as much as the Coronavirus, though it can spread if someone sneezes in your face or something. Most of the time the virus spreads through contact with body fluids, so unless you are in close contact with someone who is infected you are not likely to catch the virus.
In short, this virus is something that spreads closer to the Ebola virus but without anywhere near the lethality. And there are other factors against the virus as well. As I mentioned before the smallpox vaccine offers quite a bit of protection from this closely related virus. Given that most older adults and anyone who has been in the military have been vaccinated for smallpox, there is not a huge number of people that are even vulnerable to the virus. Plus, a specific monkeypox vaccine is in development.
So why the big hype for this disease? I think the media is looking for something to get people to panic about. Obviously, nobody cares about the coronavirus anymore and even the Ukraine war is fading into the background. Elon Musk buying twitter didn't work and neither did Roe vs Wade. If people aren't distracted they will be paying more attention to how horrible everything is going now.
With that being said, I don't believe many of the conspiracy theories about the virus. I don't think, for example, that this is just people reacting to the coronavirus vaccines (as it would be dramatically more widespread if the case). I also don't know if this is a lab leak or not, though it is certainly possible. I do think that the virus may be used to justify vote by mail.
Is Joe Biden really worried about this? I am not even sure that he's that aware that it is going on. His words contradicted his own National Security Advisor about vaccine availability. Plus we all know that Biden is mostly a puppet.
I do think that Biden's health team is worried about this. But these are the same people that said that we all had to wear masks and that the coronavirus was going to kill us all. They are prone to thinking the absolute worst case scenario is bound to happen even when it almost never does.
But for me personally, I think this story is mostly a joke. Monkeypox is not a virus I want to get, but I am not afraid of it, just like I am not afraid of coronavirus. It's not even as dangerous as the coronavirus because it doesn't spread as easily. The chances of it becoming a global pandemic the way the coronavirus did are basically nil.
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