Moneypox

The Next Thing, Ukraine now being sidelined because Russia is winning and many countries are refusing to play ball with the suicide sanctions, is of course the next pandemic, of a rare and generally mild disease called monkeypox. It does, however, have the psychological edge over COVID-19 of looking like a real plague, with yucky blisters and all.

What isn’t new is the shady background information, and the immediate abandonment of science that we saw in the last pandemic. For instance, there are rumours that the usual suspects ran a simulation on a monkeypox outbreak early in 2021 (right in the middle of a real pandemic). I’ve not been able to confirm that actually happened, but what is confirmed is that a vaccination for the disease was conveniently licensed in 2019.

EDIT: A kind source on Daily Sceptic provided me with this link about the 2021 simulation, straight from the monkey’s mouth (as it were). Given the repetition of what happened with Event 201, the bad guys show they either lack imagination, or don’t give a damn about covering their tracks.

Now admittedly the vaccine also works for smallpox (an extinct disease except in US biolabs) and for a few other rare pox-virus diseases. But vaccines are very expensive to produce (as we know from recent hard experience with collapsing economies). It is hard to envisage any possible commercial advantage that would accrue to a pharma company (in this case BAVA, which missed out on the COVID profits) from producing a vaccine for rare zoonotically spread, or even extinct, diseases. Monkeypox itself has scarcely been seen outside Africa before – and that’s scarcely a lucrative market. “We spent billions developing a vaccine for this rare disease, and it would all have been wasted if it hadn’t suddenly become a pandemic! Didn’t we luck out!”

Neverthless, it appears that despite a literal handful of cases in America, the US government has already bought millions of doses of the stuff, thus boosting BAVA’s profits whilst further increasing US national debt.

Today, though, our own UK government has acted in its usual “follow the science” way by decreeing (under what legal powers, I wonder, since the emergency COVID laws have been allowed to lapse?) that contacts of monkeypox sufferers, and not just cases, must self-isolate for no less than three weeks. Quarantine of the well, that novel invention of 2020, has clearly now become the first port of call for any infection policy.

But you’ll remember that what led to locking down healthy populations across the world was the supposedly unique and novel feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called “asymptomatic spread.” It is this that underpins pretty well all the totalitarian and uneconomic policies over COVID: mass testing, vaccination passports, visiting restrictions in care homes, mask mandates, closed GP surgeries and all the rest. It remains doubtful, if you read the literature carefully, that asymptomatic or presymptomatic spread was in reality a significant feature of COVID spread. But if it were, it would be unique amongst viral infections, even though Coronaviruses are notoriously easily spread.

Monkeypox, however, is notoriously difficult to spread. So far, the NHS webpage on the disease has not been doctored or censored. It tells us:

Only a small number of people have been diagnosed with monkeypox in the UK.

You’re extremely unlikely to have monkeypox if:

you have not recently travelled to west or central Africa
you have not been in close contact with someone who has monkeypox (such as touching their skin or sharing bedding)

But the webpage also tells us how you would be able to catch it, and it’s not easy:

You can catch monkeypox from an infected animal if you’re bitten or you touch its blood, body fluids, spots, blisters or scabs.

It may also be possible to catch monkeypox by eating meat from an infected animal that has not been cooked thoroughly, or by touching other products from infected animals (such as animal skin or fur).

Monkeypox can also be spread through:

touching clothing, bedding or towels used by someone with the monkeypox rash
touching monkeypox skin blisters or scabs
the coughs or sneezes of a person with the monkeypox rash

Note that, assuming you cook your sick relatives well before eating them, it is the infected pustules that transmit the disease. It is not, unlike COVID spread by aerosols, or even by droplets.

Yet HMG has chosen to engage in myth-making and panic-mongering by suggesting that even a contact of a sufferer from monkeypox could pass it on to others, presumably because they might be developing the disease “asymptomatically.” Not only that, but they have fully engaged, once more, the deadly “precautionary principle” to maximise the societal disruption from the non-existent risk of people without pustules passing on the disease. For the incubation period of monkeypox, we read, is usually 7-14 days. Exceptionally, it may be as long as three weeks: and so that is the period for which all contacts of sufferers (if the numbers of those can actually be massaged up, perhaps by using PCRs rather than pustules to diagnose it) must suffer solitary confinement.

No doubt that same precautionary principle will require that all cases of chickenpox, of which there are 651,000 annually here, be diagnosed as monkeypox, just to be on the safe side. After all, doctors will not be available to diagnose the disease, lest they too succumb or pass it on. Come to think of it, other common diseases like hand foot and mouth disease cause skin lesions that might confuse lay people, so best count them as “cases” too, and isolate their parents. And their school-mates and teachers.

The only thing to be done is to vaccinate everyone with BAVA’s Jynneos, which (according to their own trials) has about an 85% success rate in prevention. And of course, we all know we can rely on Big Pharma vaccine trials, don’t we? The vaccine not being widely available, though, this will require massive investment of tax-money, and world-beating fast-track production – let’s call it a “Mars Shot” project.

Yes, I know there is already unprecedented inflation, widespread fuel poverty and the risk of serious food shortages imminently. And I know we’re sending all our weapons to be bombed in Ukraine, and will need massive investment in new armaments or even boots on the ground, unless the army is self-isolating. But surely avoiding a mild, hard to spread, disease with an IFR of less than 1% is worth it!