More Monkey Business
They’re back with a rebranded scare
How wrong can a guy be? I figured if the ”real owners” and their proxies in captured regulatory agencies and legacy media were ginning up a viral scourge for fall 2024, they’d go all in for bird flu, or at least cook up a worthy candidate for “Disease X.” Seemed to be going that way.
Yet I shouldn’t be surprised they’d go back to leveraging the mpox molehill into a menacing, media-massaged mountain.
Yep, they’ve rummaged through their bottomless toybox of trumped-up terrors, and plucked out something from two years back. The monkey’s looking a bit raggedy, but still serviceable for a mass scare. It’s certainly not as threadbare as the Sars-Cov plush toy that was dangled for several years before a tiring and insufficiently terrified public. That said, it’s going to take some serious special effects to turn Spurious George into King Kontagion.
The upside for the real owners is that while “bird flu” is as yet without a vaccine, there’s already one on the shelves for good ol’ monkeypox, now rebranded as the more austere-sounding mpox. (And if you don’t believe there are teams of behavioural psychologists, public relations experts, and linguists on call for tweaking language to maximize mass anxiety, some remedial reading here and here.)
But will updated mpox vaccines be “safe and effective” in dealing with the mpox ‘clades’??
Whatever. Ka-ching!
War is immensely profitable to the investment class, and for half a decade there’s been a campaign of capital against the microbial world. It’s remarkable how the “war on terror,” launched through lies by the election-stealing Bush/Cheney junta and expanded by Barack Obama, segued into a war in the Trump administration against a terrifying new respiratory virus, with mainstream media using the exact same language of a terrorizing other.
“We all have a general sense of what “national security” means and what threatens it. But we need to rethink and update the term, now that our way of life is facing a dangerous threat, not from a foreign army, spy network or terrorist organization, but from a microscopic virus that has, quite suddenly, changed everything.”
- a March 2020 report on CNN’s website (since vapourized).
The CNN item went on to quote American diplomat George Kennan, who in 1948 defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.”
To underline the parallel to foreign threats from terrorists, CNN unironically described the novel coronavirus as a “non-state actor.”
Notes researcher Jessica Hockett: “The language and ethos of war was not improvised, in my opinion, and was part of a March - May 2020 “script” that elected/appointed officials, media, and other “stars of the show” used repeatedly and with gusto to create a sense of urgency and mobilize/galvanize citizens to take the virus seriously (so to speak) and do what government was commanding them to do.”
Incidentally, three years before the declared war on Covid, and just a year into Trump’s reign, Anthony Fauci at NIAID predicted there would be “a surprise outbreak” within the president’s first term.
Wow, right on target. Covid did indeed strike at the tail end of Trump’s reign. Marvelous foresight. You might even say prophetic. Perhaps even something the real owners could “bank on.” Wars are always profitable. Way to go, Tony.
Fast forward to 2024, and a reactivated mpox threat that the WHO has declared a “global health emergency.” You might say that the utility of the African connection to mpox is that it exploits vaguely racist fears among First Worlders of global contamination from dark people in underdeveloped areas. Yet perhaps we can expiate such uncomfortable thoughts by selling these poor unfortunates a pan-African vaccination campaign! Well, at least until mpox gets here and we have to focus all our resources on ourselves. We’re at war, after all, with yet another virus. (If still needed, Africans can always have any expiring mpox vaccines, just like they got our “soon-to-expire” Covid vaccines in 2021. Oops.)
White man’s burden, and all that.
So what exactly is going on in the Congo? The Brownstone Institute offers some perspective on the threat of mpox relative to other diseases raging across the region:
The current PHEIC [Public Health Emergency of International Concern] was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
Okay, gotta wind this up, I’m at peak disgust and I’m only 900 words into this rant. How dangerous is mpox domestically, exactly? “Most people recover without treatment after a few weeks,” notes the Canadian government health advisory on mpox. Oh well. I took the liberty of taking a screenshot of the page, in case the statement is altered or deleted within the next few weeks.
Wait, whoa. THIS JUST IN.
You know, I read the word "unironically" in this article as "ironically", either unironically or ironically enough. Which reminds me of a superhero created by some Canadian comedy team, I can't remember who but I'll look it up after writing this, who was called "Irony Man"; a caped crusader who'd swoop in any given emergency and point out the inherent irony of the situation. Oh boy, do we ever need an "Irony Man" now!
M-pox could be a chastisement for those promoting the transgender movement and those horrific gender-bender surgeries for kids, since it is a disease primarily affecting men who have sex with other men. "Don't tell God you have a big problem, tell your problem you have a big God."...an "irony God" perhaps.