AIDS, COVID, and here we go again: Monkeypox dissembling
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Readers of a certain age will remember that, back in the 80s, Fauci pulled an about-face, and after telling the truth about AIDS: how it spread, and who was being affected, and turned instead to coordinate a campaign to convince the public that AIDS was something for all of us, and not primarily a disease of gays and intravenous blood users. That was because Fauci, the gay community, and the public health apparatus all worried that, if it were seen as a “gay disease”, funding devoted to care for the infected, and find a cure would be minimal. They may well have been right, and though an effective cur has never been developed, drugs were developed that made AIDS something to be lived with, rather than a death sentence. And that’s good, although it was disturbing to see a public relations/political issue disguised as sound, medical science.
Then came COVID and again, Fauci and the NHI and CDC conspired to hide which groups were vulnerable, at least in part because they wanted to shut down the entire country. They worked with the mass media flying monkeys and social network kings to quash any suggestions that protection be focused on the elderly and immune-compromised, with the react that DeSantis, who did exactly that, was branded mass murderer while the true murderer Andrew Cuomo, was elevated to sainthood. Should we mention the evil triumvirate’s and the country’s mayors’ and governors’ caving into pressure from the teachers’ unions, and the resulting permanent damage done to school children?
So after all that, they’re doing it again.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Director, CDC Division of HIV prevention, presented at both monkeypox sessions at the conference, and similarly addressed the need to combat stigma associated with the disease. In June, as part of the CDC's Monkeypox Response Team, he published an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine that addressed the issue specifically.
In Monkeypox: Avoiding the Mistakes of Past Infectious Disease, Daskalakis and his co-authors warned "[e]xperience has shown the dangers of characterizing a disease by associating it with a single population or a particular identity. Such associations can create stigma that outlives the outbreak and lost opportunities to detect and address the infection in other populations. Knowledge is power."Monkeypox virus infection can be transmitted through cutaneous routes during close or intimate contact with a person whose lesions are not yet crusted over and healed, via fomites that have had contact with a person with monkeypox, and by respiratory droplets among people with close, sustained face-to-face contact.
He says that we shouldn't make the same mistake as we did with AIDS, permitting people to wrongly believe that monkeypox, like AIDS, is almost exclusively a disease of gay men.
We closed churches and schools for over a year during the faux COVID panic, denied children the chance to visit and say goodby to their dying parents, who died alone and abandoned, and shut down critical support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, but we mustn’t close gay saunas, postpone gay sex festivals, or even suggest to gays that Monkeypox isn’t being spread by allowing their pets to sleep with them (except gerbils, but that’s another topic). Refrain from sex with your multiple partners, at least until you’re all vaccinated? Why, you homophobe!
Quick: name a public institution or government branch that hasn’t forfeited all right to be respected or trusted after decades of this duplicity.
team biden
