Quelle surprise: Monkey Pox has been declared the next official panic

/

well butter my butt and call me a biscuit!

The story has all the usual suspects that we learned about during Anti-Trump Campaign One, including bureaucratic inertia, FDA incompetence, and so forth, but there’s also this:

Hot Air:

“There’s another factor fueling the spread. Science journalist Donald McNeil, who’s already been canceled and therefore at no risk of further cancellation, published a piece today wondering if it’s too much for the most at-risk population to avoid superspreader events while the western world struggles to get a handle on this.”

This May, it appeared among gay men, especially those who had visited four venues: the Darklands leather fetish festival in Belgium; the annual Pride Festival in Spain’s Canary Islands; a gay rave at Berlin’s Berghain techno club; and the Paraiso sauna in Madrid, which, since it had darkened cubicles for orgies, a bondage cell and a bar, was really more of a huge sex club than a spa.

Even though one “sex-positive” party after another has turned into super-spreader events, there has been no willingness by the organizers of such parties to cancel or even reschedule them until more men can be vaccinated. June was Pride Month in New York and cases are surging in the city now. Two recent parties in San Francisco, Electroluxx Pride and the Afterglow Blacklight Discotheque had cases linked to them. And yet more events, like Provincetown Bear Week are going forward anyway.

“No one’s out there trying to get monkeypox, obviously, but the people who ditched masks and flouted restrictions during the pandemic weren’t trying to catch COVID either. And they took plenty of heat for not doing what they could to help slow the spread from those of us who insisted on following the rules. McNeil will get an earful about blaming the victim and stigmatizing gays who attend those events but he’s merely being logically consistent. If we’re now in a second (albeit much slower-moving and less dangerous) pandemic, he writes, it’s not too much to ask that “Bear Week” be rescheduled for later this year, after more people have had a chance to be vaccinated.”

While you’re waiting to die from this dreaded disease (no one has yet, but give them time to dredge up some victims) here’s a time-killer: