Western Standard - August 26, 2024


'Monkeypox Panic： Let's follow the science with monkeypox'


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

205.20581

Word count

1,017

Sentence count

79

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Monkeypox has been around for a while, but it hasn t been as well-studied as it is today. Is it really a pandemic? Is it even a thing? And why is it being spread in the gay community?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 We're talking about monkeypox, yeah, or mpox, as they like to say.
00:00:04.900 Authoritarians, they're eager to return to the heady days of national emergencies
00:00:08.280 with some sort of infectious disease to keep everybody afraid.
00:00:12.000 They've been desperately seeking a new pandemic for a couple of years,
00:00:14.880 and so far they've been out of luck.
00:00:16.360 I mean, the bird flu failed to captivate the developed world
00:00:19.140 despite the best efforts of legacy media,
00:00:21.460 and now the establishment's trying again, and this is the second round of it,
00:00:24.920 to convince the world that monkeypox is indeed going to surge and threaten us all.
00:00:30.300 We can't go a day without seeing a news item on monkeypox
00:00:32.960 and the threat that it allegedly presents,
00:00:35.460 but the statistics just don't justify the attention it's gathering.
00:00:39.580 I mean, monkeypox came and went a couple of years ago, but it had very little impact.
00:00:43.080 There's now apparently a new strain we must watch for.
00:00:45.280 Yes, of course, doesn't it sound familiar, the new strain?
00:00:47.480 Currently, the number of people diagnosed in Canada with this new strain is zero.
00:00:52.040 Whether you're looking at the old strain or the new strain,
00:00:54.140 the death count in Canada for both strains remains consistent at zero.
00:00:57.880 You have as much chance of dying of monkeypox in Canada as you do of leprosy,
00:01:02.560 but you wouldn't know it from watching the news.
00:01:04.980 You know, like I said, we're supposed to call it M-pox,
00:01:07.160 since monkeypox is apparently insensitive to monkeys or something.
00:01:10.380 I'm going to keep simple and keep to the term monkeypox.
00:01:12.900 I don't think too many monkeys read my columns anyways.
00:01:15.740 All that said, monkeypox does exist, and it does sound like a nasty disease to catch.
00:01:19.780 Even if it isn't fatal, it's going to make you pretty sick,
00:01:21.880 and your body could be covered with oozing lesions that might scar,
00:01:24.920 kind of like chickenpox.
00:01:26.120 The news is also warning us that monkeypox could come without symptoms.
00:01:30.120 But how they know that remains a mystery,
00:01:31.480 because people without symptoms don't get tested for monkeypox.
00:01:34.220 But I guess that's somehow the experts know.
00:01:37.480 Sounds familiar again, doesn't it, though?
00:01:39.540 Asymptomatic COVID, I mean, that swept the world as well.
00:01:41.780 Diseases have become so sneaky, we can't even tell that we have them anymore.
00:01:45.380 Now, part of the issue with monkeypox is that it's being predominantly spread
00:01:48.380 among the gay male community.
00:01:50.020 That adds a political sensitivity element to the whole issue,
00:01:54.100 which tempts folks to try and claim this disease threatens everybody,
00:01:57.460 because we don't want to offend anybody.
00:01:58.840 But that's a dangerous and stupid approach to take with an infectious disease.
00:02:03.280 That approach to a novel disease was done before,
00:02:05.540 and it came at a cost of untold lives.
00:02:07.840 You've got to remember, for those of us old enough,
00:02:09.280 when AIDS first came upon the scene in the early 80s,
00:02:11.380 the first reports were blunt, and it was pretty frightening.
00:02:13.540 A new disease was sweeping the gay male community, 1.00
00:02:15.600 predominantly in California, and it was fatal.
00:02:17.380 It was called gay-acquired immune deficiency initially.
00:02:21.460 Yeah, AIDS.
00:02:22.740 And it was also referred to as the gay cancer.
00:02:24.680 I'm pretty insensitive, but it really got to the point, didn't it?
00:02:27.100 Now, the word was gay, gay was dropped,
00:02:29.260 and the term AIDS came from there on in.
00:02:31.640 But as it became evident how horrible and dangerous this disease was,
00:02:35.380 the strategy became one of trying to tell everybody
00:02:37.620 that they were at risk for it.
00:02:39.300 When I was in high school in the 80s,
00:02:40.400 we were told that it would sweep the heterosexual community.
00:02:42.660 Within years, we'd all know somebody with AIDS.
00:02:44.740 It was a frightening scenario for those of us entering our 20s,
00:02:46.920 and we were approaching our peak promiscuity.
00:02:50.380 Thankfully, the warnings of the transmissibility of the HIV virus
00:02:53.940 were greatly exaggerated.
00:02:55.040 The disease wasn't that easy to transmit through conventional sex.
00:02:59.220 And while the spread was devastating to those impacted,
00:03:01.820 it certainly was.
00:03:02.600 You can't understate that.
00:03:03.880 It remained predominantly within the gay, male, and IV drug-using communities.
00:03:07.680 That said, again, we can't understate it.
00:03:09.900 It killed millions of people, and it's still killing people today.
00:03:12.640 But what if instead of pretending the disease was hitting everybody equally,
00:03:15.240 we'd set aside political correctness and targeted prevention and treatment
00:03:18.060 toward the communities that were hit worst?
00:03:20.560 Good lives have been saved if more outreach was directed
00:03:22.680 to the gay, male, and IV drug-using communities
00:03:24.720 rather than pretending it was a risk for everybody?
00:03:27.780 Resources for diagnosis, prevention, and treatment
00:03:30.020 surely could have been better utilized and more effective
00:03:32.560 if they'd been directed to the areas where they were needed most.
00:03:35.160 Instead, our medical experts and social services were running around
00:03:37.960 trying to tell heterosexual high school kids
00:03:39.920 that they were at high risk when they weren't.
00:03:42.100 The disease never spread as they said it would,
00:03:44.840 but the fear sure did.
00:03:46.320 Now, monkeypox isn't the threat that the panic porn pushers
00:03:49.380 are trying to make it into,
00:03:50.560 but it still can be terrible for those affected.
00:03:52.700 But let's not repeat the errors of the 80s
00:03:55.300 and succumb to political correctness
00:03:56.720 rather than being guided by medical reality.
00:03:59.300 Again, this is being predominantly spread in the gay, male, community.
00:04:02.040 If we want to prevent it from spreading and harming people,
00:04:04.200 let's target prevention, diagnosis, and treatment
00:04:06.140 to the communities most likely to be hit.
00:04:07.740 It's not a slight against the LGBTQ community to do this.
00:04:11.180 If you really wanted to harm the community,
00:04:12.360 I can't think of a better way than to pretend
00:04:13.780 this was a widespread problem outside of the community
00:04:16.480 and spread the resources too thin all over again.
00:04:19.260 The left loves to how we'll follow the science
00:04:21.200 when talking about policy issues.
00:04:22.740 Well, it's time we set political correctness aside
00:04:25.300 and follow the science
00:04:26.500 when it comes to dealing with infectious diseases.
00:04:28.620 We'll see you next time on top of Sunday.
00:04:30.840 Bye-bye.
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