A person in California has the monkeypox virus, testing positive for a severe form of the disease that is epidemic in Africa.
It is the first known case in the United States, and was reported by the California Department of Health on Saturday.
This person with monkeypox recently returned from East Africa. “The patient was diagnosed in San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, and was isolating at home,” reports the New York Times:
Officials at the California Department of Public Health and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are reaching out to potential contacts of the patient for further testing.
There is no evidence that this version of the [monkeypox] virus, called Clade Ib, is circulating in communities in the United States, CDC officials said.
Infections in people returning from Africa, however, have been found in Germany, Sweden, Thailand and the United Kingdom, among other countries. A case in India was reported in a person returning from the United Arab Emirates.
In Germany, Sweden, Thailand and India, the virus was transmitted no farther. In the United Kingdom, the infected individual passed mpox to three household contacts.
In 2022, the World Health Organization renamed monkeypox “mpox.” It did so after some people complained that the term “monkeypox” was racist, arguing that it “reinforced racism and stigma about African countries and their residents being a source of disease.” We believe this name change is confusing and logically inconsistent (the virus that causes the disease is still referred to as the “monkeypox virus”), so we continue to refer to the disease as monkeypox, as do the media in some English-speaking countries.
In August, Nature reported that monkeypox was spreading again. But this time, it will kill more people than it did in 2022. And it could affect a broader slice of the U.S. population than it did in 2022, when it was overwhelmingly gay men who suffered from it, as gay sex orgies spread the disease throughout America.
“Evidence from past outbreaks indicates that the viral strain spreading in Central Africa is more lethal than the strain that sparked the 2022 global mpox outbreak, which has since infected more than 95,000 people and killed more than 180.”
As Nature explained in August, a new
strain of the monkeypox virus has spread rapidly across Central Africa in the past few months. The outbreak prompted the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) to declare its first-ever public-health emergency on 13 August, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is meeting on 14 August to consider a global declaration.
The moves reflect scientists’ deep worry that the outbreak of mpox, the disease caused by the monkeypox virus, could evolve into an epidemic that spreads across the continent — and possibly beyond. They note that the virus is making an alarming appearance not just in rural regions, but also in densely populated areas.
During the past month, mpox infections have surged in Central Africa, affecting locations including Bukavu, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that has more than 1 million residents, and four countries in the region have reported mpox infections for the first time. These infections are probably connected to an outbreak that began in late 2023 in South Kivu province, a region of the DRC that has been ravaged by violent conflict….
African countries have already reported more confirmed and suspected mpox infections in 2024 than in all of 2023: 17,500 this year, compared with about 15,000 in 2023. Children are particularly vulnerable: around two-thirds of infections in the DRC are in people under the age of 15….the virus has spread to densely populated areas, presumably carried by highly mobile populations such as sex workers, and to neighbouring countries. South Kivu is also confronting a humanitarian crisis that makes it harder to track and treat infected people, and the DRC is grappling with the aggressive spread of other diseases, such as cholera. Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda have all reported their first-ever mpox infections in the past month, and in a single week in early August, the DRC reported nearly 2,400 suspected infections and 56 deaths…
Mpox causes fluid-filled skin lesions, which can be painful, and, in severe cases, death.
In 2022, thousands of people in the U.S. suffered from monkeypox, overwhelmingly gay men who got the disease from unprotected sex. But the epidemic petered out despite the government’s failure to get at-risk men vaccinated. A single vaccination for monkeypox could require a hundred pages of government paperwork, doctors complained. “The federal government has not only failed to get its act together to bring monkeypox vaccines here from Denmark but also made it a nightmare for doctors to prescribe the vaccines we do have on hand,” reported Reason Magazine.
As Reason Magazine reported in 2022:
One of the big challenges doctors are facing, besides the lack of availability of one vaccine, is jumping through the appropriate hoops to provide a different vaccine…There are more than a million doses of a vaccine named Jynneos in a storage facility in Denmark that is awaiting approval to be sent to the U.S., even though the facility has already been inspected by European officials.
There’s another drug, TPOXX (full name: Tecovirimat), that can also be used to treat people infected with monkeypox. But access to the drug is restricted ….rules and documentation [are] required to attempt to treat somebody infected using the drug… this process requires physicians to fill out 100 pages of paperwork for each patient they want to prescribe TPOXX to….medical leaders complained that this red tape made it “nearly impossible” to treat potentially hundreds of infected patients. It can take up to three hours to process a single patient just to get them the drug…The blame is being laid on the poor response of President Joe Biden’s administration. Sen. Richard Burr (R–N.C.)… sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra:
Beyond failures in testing, the administration’s strategy to utilize vaccines and treatments that are effective against monkeypox has also been appalling. We have vaccines and treatments that we can use during this response. These tools are available in large part due to the resources the United States has provided for smallpox preparedness through Project BioShield….But securing a stockpile of vaccines is only effective if we are able to get shots in arms.
The Biden administration let pointless red tape stop delivery of 1 million monkeypox vaccine doses. “The U.S. may be losing the fight against monkeypox, scientists say…weaknesses in the public health system are giving the virus a chance to become entrenched,” reported the New York Times:
As epidemics go, the monkeypox outbreak should have been relatively easy to snuff out. The virus does not spread efficiently except through intimate contact, and tests and vaccines were at hand even before the current outbreak.
Yet the response in the United States has been sluggish and timid, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid pandemic, experts say, raising troubling questions about the nation’s preparedness for pandemic threats.
The Washington Post reported in 2022 that “public health experts, including within the Biden administration, are increasingly concerned that the federal government’s handling of the largest-ever U.S. monkeypox outbreak is mirroring its slow and inept response to the coronavirus pandemic 2½ years ago, with potentially dire consequences. As a result, they said, community transmission is occurring largely undetected, and the critical window in which to control the outbreak is closing quickly.”
As it observed, “Public health experts also have criticized U.S. officials for not proactively vaccinating high-risk individuals against the virus, even as other nations have moved more aggressively to do so. Public health experts and activists” had unsuccessfully sought “more-proactive vaccinations in high-risk communities, warning that the outbreak could be amplified as the gay community celebrates Pride Month.”
Ace of Spades wrote an excellent article about how the same “public-health” phonies who sought to shut down all of society to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 — even settings where COVID wasn’t spreading — refused to even warn against the gay sex orgies that were spreading monkeypox throughout America, even though that could save the lives of gay men:
Feels a lot like AIDS, when the NIH, headed by, what’s this?, Anthony Fauci would not shut down gay bathhouses or even recommend doing so, but did tell straight women to insist that straight men use dental dams when they went down on them.
Our public health authorities will do anything — anything! — if it saves one life.
Except tell a member of a noisy leftwing political constituency that they’re going to have to give up a pastime they enjoy, like rioting during a pandemic or orgies during a pox pandemic that is easily spread by close contact, as occurs during sex….. under covid, the government was also very aggressive about pushing non-medicinal interventions, like forbidding certain behaviors as well as outlawing groups larger than ten.
Note that monkeypox is not technically a sexually transmitted disease, but it is transmitted by close skin-to-skin contact, and that can only occur in a handful of human interactions. Sex, of course….And you can only spread it if you’re touching many people in this way….That’s why this is mostly being spread by gay men at orgies and raves and through anonymous sex. Sex is a main way to spread it, and you need to be in physical contact with multiple people to both catch it and then retransmit it.
And yet: There are no advisories from the CDC telling gay men to cool it with the orgies and anonymous sex. No stern warnings to… not even go celibate, but just pick one sexual partner for the duration of the pandemic and be monogamous temporarily.
No, that’s too much of an imposition on the gay community.
But when this spreads out to the general population, they’ll have no problem telling us our kids will have to remain locked in their homes for a year, will they?
