Believe It Or Not, the CDC's Messaging on Monkeypox, Claiming That Straights and Gays Are Equally At-Risk From Monkeypox, Is Successful.
Gays Have Been Falsely Reassured They Are At No Elevated Risk From the Virus. Another Success for the CDC!

A little while back, Josh Barro wrote about some truly disingenuous, deranged messaging on monkeypox he heard on NPR.

The lies about monkeypox come not from the CDC, but from the Oregon Health Authority, but the OHA is just repeating the lies the CDC is pushing -- that "monkeypox can affect everyone."

Get ready for some absolute insanity.

How Not To Talk To The Public About Monkeypox A case study in hiding the ball, public health official-style

[N]ow: monkeypox, and the public health officials who keep gaslighting us...

The dialogue is between Jenn Chávez (host of the local NPR affiliate) and Dr. Tim Menza (OHA adviser).

Dr. Menza does four things that are emblematic of how public health has repeatedly failed us in recent years:

1. He fails to include developing knowledge about an ongoing outbreak in his public communication about how this outbreak is happening.

2. He lets woke ideology get in the way of clear communication.

3. He withholds information because he doesn't trust the public to use it in the way he would like them to.

4. He unnecessarily alarms the broad public about a disease with fairly specific risk factors, while failing to effectively highlight those factors for those most at risk.

As you know from reading this newsletter, there are several ways that monkeypox can spread, but in this outbreak it largely is spreading though sexual contact between men. So, you would think, when the OPB host asked "what are the best ways for people to reduce their risk of contracting the virus?" Menza might have at least mentioned sex. Unfortunately, he did not. He found time to discuss the risks associated with a handful of other activities -- being in an office, learning in a classroom, going to a bar or a club, massaging someone with monkeypox sores, etc. -- but couldn't quite bring himself to say "sex."

Here's his interminable answer to that simple question:

We can kind of try to put activities to specific risk levels. Things that I would say are unlikely to transmit hMPXV are things like taking public transportation, going out to eat, going to the grocery store, going to have coffee with friends, being in an office with your coworkers and learning in a classroom. Those things are all low-risk activities. Hanging out outside at a bar or a club or a cafe, totally low risk activities.

Note that he refuses to say "monkeypox" because he doesn't like the word. You may have heard, "monkeypox" is racist, for some reason.

So instead of using the word that people will understand, he uses a term, hMPXV, that people will not understand.

He's from the Government, and he's here to help.

Being in more crowded spaces where there's less clothing and more skin-to-skin contact, like a bar or club perhaps, that's where that skin-to-skin contact comes into play. We've been trying to message to folks to just consider the amount of skin-to-skin contact you might expect in a situation or a place that you might be or an event that you might be attending.

Do tell. Are there any other activities that might involve more substantial skin-to-skin contact that should be avoided...?

And then the things that then move up in scale are things that include more prolonged skin-to-skin contact. Like perhaps massaging an area with skin that is affected by hMPXV, or hugging in contact with skin that is affected by hMPXV. Or perhaps cuddling. The other thing is we know that when we talk about respiratory secretions we think about saliva too. So things like kissing or sharing a toothbrush might be a little bit higher risk.

So kissing and massages should be avoided. Is there anything like kissing and massaging, or that involves kissing and massaging, that should be avoided?

No?

There's not?

Oh, okay.

But stay away from open lesions and scabs! Other than that, GAME ON!

And then the things that have the most risk is when there's that really direct prolonged skin-to-skin contact with the sores, the scabs or the fluids of the rash.

Barro, who is gay, wonders who could penetrate this obfuscation and fog and come away fortified with actual useful knowledge about how to avoid monkeypox?

Imagine you were a person who knew nothing about monkeypox. Would hearing that answer help you understand what monkeypox risks you have and what you can do to address them? Not really. If you're not a man who has sex with men, you might come away inordinately concerned that you'll catch monkeypox from being in a crowd at a concert.

Menza does eventually briefly allude to gay men, after being asked to discuss the "stigma" associated with gay men.

Chávez: Right now my understanding is that many of the cases in Oregon have been found in cisgender men who have sex with men. And I'm wondering how you are approaching public health messaging around this -- resisting stigmatization and shame and blame while also still targeting those most at risk right now with resources.

Many cases?

95- 99%?

That's more than "many." It's actually just a handful shy of "all."

Note here Menza mentions just about every other sexuality, attempting to "balance it all out" so as not to highlight gays.

Menza: It's quite the challenge. What we've been trying to do as best as we can is stick with what we know. In the United States, we know that people assigned male at birth who have sex with men and people assigned female at birth, including at least one pregnant person, have been affected by hMPXV in Oregon.

If you couldn't understand that, congratulations, you're a normal human being who hasn't been corrupted by their Alien Lunatic Nonsense Language.

What this Language Defiler means is that men ("people assigned male at birth") and women ("people assigned women at birth"), including one pregnant woman (here, called a pregnant person), have gotten monkeypox.

He's really trying to avoid saying that gay men get the disease. So he's naming everyone else who has gotten it, except gay men.

We know that cisgender men and nonbinary people are affected by hMPXV.

Cisgender = normal people, the people who identify as the sex they, you know, actually are. Nonbinary people are people who claim they're... I dunno, they're both male and female or both or neither. It's a vague category. It's a category that exists basically to say, "Daddy didn't hug me."

So once again, we are talking about everyone except gay men.

Will he finally mention gay sex in his final sentence? Well... no.

While most identify as gay or queer and report close contact with people assigned male at birth, we have cases that also identify as straight and bisexual and report close contact with people assigned female at birth.

He starts off by sort of evasively hinting that gays might have something to do with monkeypox:

* "While most identify as gay or queer" -- not that they are gay or queer, mind you, just that they "identify" that way. Note he refuses to say that these gay or queer people are men. He leaves open the possibility he's talking about lesbians, which is 100% false; lesbians have virtually no risk of getting monkeypox.

* "and report close contact with people assigned male at birth" -- that is, have close contact with men

So he's talking about "gay or queer" people, possibly women, not gay men specifically, who are gay or queer having "close contact" with men. Notice he refuses to say "has sex with men. Instead, again, a medical professional resorts, daintily, to misleading euphemism: "close contact."

A medical professional, allegedly warning the public about a disease chiefly spread by gay sex, has decided that it would be too scandalous to say the word "sex."

Well my stars and garters! I shall faint if you continue with these crude suggestions about close contact!

And if that was not designed to mislead listeners enough -- and it is designed to mislead listeners -- he further obfuscates the simple truth that "men who have sex with men are those who are primarily catching, and those who are primarily spreading, monkeypox," by immediately talking about straight people again!

* "we have cases that also identify as straight and bisexual and report close contact with people assigned female at birth. "

He began vaguely alluding, hazily, to gay people for one second, and then immediately took that all back and insisted again that straight people were just as much at risk, and so are "people assigned female at birth," that is, women.

You could never in a million years guess from these deliberate lies that gay men are the ones catching and transmitting monkeypox nigh-exclusively.

Barro comments:

...

It is unacceptable, if you have Dr. Menza's job, to speak in woke word salads like this. Menza is speaking on a broadcast news program. It is his job to communicate in clear terms to the broad public. And few members of the public describe themselves as "assigned male at birth" or even think of their sex as something that was "assigned." This is woke jargon, and it's unsuitable for a news interview.

Barro points out Mendes then does the usual Woke Hustle and starts getting specific about who needs the vaccine and who should get priority in receiving it-- gay men who have sex with men.

Suddenly it's not a word salad. He calls this a "thoughtful prioritization" of distribution of the vaccine.

Barro:

What "thoughtful prioritization" means is that, when it comes time to allocate scarce monkeypox vaccine, the same public health officials who hem and haw and obfuscate about "anyone can get monkeypox" suddenly become really clear that they're looking for men with multiple or anonymous male sex partners.

This is a common tactic among health agencies, which are really Woke Political Agencies.

@jbarro Josh Barro @jbarro

It's grimly funny: The DC Dept of Health one-sheet says nothing to help people figure out if they're at disproportionate risk of monkeypox, but when it comes time to allocate scarce vaccine, suddenly the department can be frank about who actually needs it.

Now, I've wondered for some time: Is their strategy to lie to the straights, and tell them "gays aren't really at greater risk, so don't get any evil straight thoughts about gays," while attempting a Down-Low Secret Message for gays, hinting, "Don't listen to what we just told the straights, we lie to those Stupid Breeders, but you should know you are seriously at risk for monkeypox?"

Doing what Yasser Arafat did, when speaking in English versus when speaking in Arafat?

Barro notes that Mendes admits he's doing just that:

At the same time, we know that anyone can be affected by hMPXV. And so we want to provide a level of awareness to those who may not be affected to quite the degree that gay and queer men who have sex with men are affected. And so at times we do feel caught between how we communicate to the general public and then how we have another channel of communication to folks most affected by hMPXV. And our strategy has been this is to really use our community partners to do a lot of the community engagement and communication to folks who are most affected by hMPXV. Partly because ... the messaging is best delivered by folks and organizations who know the communities best. And so our task has been trying to partner as much as possible to listen to those communities and to hear how best we can support [them].

In other words: When we're communicating on "open comms," broadcasting to a general audience, the official story is that "everyone can get monkeypox," but when we're one-on-one with gays, or in a clinic that serves gays, we can tell them the real story, that they are at a very highly elevated risk for monkeypox and maybe they should slow down on the number of sexual partners they're accumulating.

Barro:

This makes me angriest of all.

He's being explicit: There's one message for the general public, and another message that they're trying to deliver only to gay men. They rely on "community partners" to deliver that secret message. Well, first of all, what about gay men who listen to Oregon Public Broadcasting? I promise you there are gays listening to public radio. And if they hear this interview, they're going to come away less informed and less equipped to avoid monkeypox than they ought to be.

Not only is this an extremely dishonest and cynical strategy, but it's also extremely stupid.

What gay guy is going to show up at a gay clinic to hear the truth about monkeypox? Probably gay guys who have already contracted monkeypox.

When the guy comes in asking if the sores on his anus might be monkeypox, it's too late to give him the "Secret Message For the Gays" you've withheld from him.

So yes, you can deliver your "Secret Message For the Gays" in a private setting without any Evil Straights around to hear the truth, but, of course, you'll be telling only the people who have already been infected. You will not be warning the people not yet infected, who could avoid infection, if you told them the truth.

A poll proves that this strategy isn't working. If it were working, then gays should be getting the "secret message" that they are at a highly, highly elevated risk for monkeypox and be more concerned about it than the general population.

But, because the CDC and woke health agencies -- that is, all health agencies -- have been lying to them about their risk of getting the disease, they're barely more concerned about monkeypox.

Turns out the strategy of getting on the radio or TV and lying to millions while taking people aside one or two at a time and telling them the truth results in far more people hearing the lie than the truth.

Strangely enough!

Morning Consult finds the CDC's and health "authorities'" plans are working about as well as all of their other plans: gays, the only group who is in any real danger of getting monkeypox, is only slightly more worried about monkeypox than the general population, most of whom have almost zero risk of getting it.

This is AIDS all over again: straights, who have very little risk of contracting monkeypox, have been falsely alarmed about the disease, and gays, who are at very high risk, have been falsely reassured. The CDC is determined to claim that "everyone is equal!" even where the science they supposedly are adherents of says that no, not everyone is equal in risk.

But now we're all "equal" -- equally lied to, equally uninformed, equally unprepared, equally exposed, equally panicked.

And compare this form of messaging -- soft innuendo and suggestion, hoping that people will "get it" by hearing the "code words" -- to how they messaged to a general audience about covid: "THIS IS A PANDEMIC OF THE UNVACCINATED!," Joe Biden shouted.

"WE ARE FACING A WINTER OF DEATH," he screamed.

But the protected class of gays get winks and Secret Messages. Because "stigma," and also because we would never, ever want to say a single negative word about rampant anonymous and group gay sex.

That's an American Sacrament!

And now: Gee, it turns out that this crap that it's "just about skin contact" and not about anal sex with rando dudes was probably a lie all along anyway.

NBCNews admits -- reluctantly, I'm sure -- that a "growing cadre" of scientists say that monkeypox is not spread just by skin-to-skin contact, but specifically by sex, and more specifically, by anal sex between gay men.

Sex between men, not skin contact, is fueling monkeypox, new research suggests

The claim that skin-to-skin contact during sex between men, not intercourse itself, drives most monkeypox transmission is likely backward, a growing group of experts say.

No one should look this up, but the lesions on the anus and the penis should probably have been a tell, no?

Welcome to the Brave New Deadly World of Woke Medicine, where "scientists" and "doctors" lie to patients according to the instructions they're given by Political Commissars.

Aug. 17, 2022, 8:47 AM PDT By Benjamin Ryan

Since the outset of the global monkeypox outbreak in May, public health and infectious disease experts have told the public that the virus is largely transmitting through skin-to-skin contact, in particular during sex between men.

Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself -- both anal as well as oral intercourse -- is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.

In recent weeks, a growing body of scientific evidence -- including a trio of studies published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as reports from national, regional and global health authorities -- has suggested that experts may have framed monkeypox's typical transmission route precisely backward.

Because they were determined to absolve gay sex of any role in this, despite the fact that it was being spread in gay raves and orgies, and despite the fact that 95-99% of those infected were gay men having sex with multiple partners.

So: "it must be skin to skin contact! And Monkeypox can infect anybody!"

...

"A growing body of evidence supports that sexual transmission, particularly through seminal fluids, is occurring with the current MPX outbreak," said Dr. Aniruddha Hazra, medical director of the University of Chicago Sexual Wellness Clinic, referring to monkeypox and to recent studies that found the virus in semen.

Consequently, scientists told NBC News that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health authorities should update their monkeypox communication strategies to more strongly emphasize the centrality of intercourse among gay and bisexual men, who comprise nearly all U.S. cases, to the virus' spread.

Nah, let's just keep pursuing the "Lying to the Straights, but Then Giving Secret Messages to the Gays In One-on-One Briefings" strategy.

The Science (TM)

Good luck getting out of here alive!

Meanwhile: Don't expect any warnings from the CDC about this:

Obviously this is all due to that skin-to-skin contact you have with... a dog's... fur.

posted by Ace at 01:16 PM

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