The CDC, Infectious Ideas, And Calling A Deer A Horse

The Founding Fathers Should Have Let Us Form Militias

By now you’ve probably heard a bit about monkeypox and have wondered if a new pandemic is on the cusp of emerging. The White House (along with several states) has declared a public health emergency over the new disease, signaling to the public that we may be headed toward playing the public-health crisis game all over again. 

Initial reports on disease characteristics have detailed high disease incidence in gay men, with increasing number of reports coming out of infections in children and now in some household animals. 98+% of the cases reported in the UK, New York, and elsewhere have been male. The New England Journal of Medicine reports:

We report 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, 2022, at 43 sites in 16 countries. Overall, 98% of the persons with infection were gay or bisexual men, 75% were White, and 41% had human immunodeficiency virus infection; the median age was 38 years. Transmission was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95% of the persons with infection. In this case series, 95% of the persons presented with a rash (with 64% having <10 lesions), 73% had anogenital lesions, and 41% had mucosal lesions (with 54 having a single genital lesion). Common systemic features preceding the rash included fever (62%), lethargy (41%), myalgia (31%), and headache (27%); lymphadenopathy was also common (reported in 56%). Concomitant sexually transmitted infections were reported in 109 of 377 persons (29%) who were tested. Among the 23 persons with a clear exposure history, the median incubation period was 7 days (range, 3 to 20). Monkeypox virus DNA was detected in 29 of the 32 persons in whom seminal fluid was analyzed.

Despite the overwhelmingly sexual nature of transmission reported so far, public health agencies have been somewhat vague in their messaging on disease propagation, with the CDC shying away from directly stating who is most at risk of infection and instead issuing a report on July 12th calling for monkeypox to be understood as being a health risk for everyone. On July 29th, in a report titled “How It Spreads,” the CDC offered a bulleted list ostensibly detailing how monkeypox is going around, the second point of which was fomite-transmission (disease transmission via contact with infected objects), which, so far, there has been no evidence of. In a later report released on August 5th, the CDC made their intention of putting politics before health clear by telling health practitioners that they should  “address equity, and minimize stigma” in order to prevent negative sentiment aimed toward the gay community. Ideology comes first for the CDC. 

Another failure of the CDC to function in line with its stated mission came just last week with a total reversal of the divisive, unscientific covid policies they espoused for two years. They were wrong about covid, they will be wrong about monkeypox, they will be wrong indefinitely.

Im going to veer off here for a second as a few important thoughts come to mind about what we’re witnessing. The founding fathers saw the dangers of an excessively powerful central government, but they didn’t see the dangers in infectious ideas that could undermine the leaders of even the very best republics, like the one they set their lives at stake to create.