CDC Leaders Continue to Mislead About Monkeypox
by Anne Hendershott, Crisis Magazine:
As monkeypox—a disease that the CDC refuses to identify as a sexually transmitted disease, even though it is spread almost exclusively by men who have sex with men—continues to rage through the gay community, the complaints about “government inaction” have already begun. Claiming that the government has not done enough to keep the gay community “safe” from the disease that causes painful genital lesions—and is primarily spread through those lesions—New York Magazine has led the charge claiming that neither the City of New York nor the federal government has done enough. Demanding “more testing” and “more vaccines,” the gay community is calling on the federal government to do more to keep men who have sex with men “safe.”
It seems that keeping gay men safe may be more difficult than anyone anticipated. And it seems that even very young children may not be safe from contracting monkeypox from men who have sex with men. Recently, Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, reported that two young children have contracted monkeypox in the United States. Walensky added that both cases were traced to “household contact” with individuals in the “men-who-have-sex-with-men community.”
Gay activist James Krellenstein decried the “inaction” by the government to “protect the gay community during this outbreak,” claiming that the government’s lack of urgency is a “recipe for disaster that will lead to a mass transmission event.”
[…] Most agree that much of the anxiety in the gay community has emerged from the lack of information about the disease, the symptoms, and how it is spread. But the fact that nearly all of the documented cases have emerged in the population of men who have sex with men seems to suggest that the disease has a behavioral component to it. Those who gathered at the Chelsea Sexual Health Clinic know that already—they just don’t want to acknowledge that they can easily avoid this disease by changing their behavior.
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