DEI viral outcompete: monkey-business with monkey-pox
partisan politics > public health. again.
prior to 2020, unless you had had some cause to come in contact with the gears of their machinery, most americans had a reasonably positive impression of public health agencies. the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, they were doing good work at hard jobs and had offices full of bright and hardworking scientists seeking to keep america safe. or so so many told themselves…
it’s amazing stories you can believe if you’ve never seen how the sausage is made…
but how do you like them now?
the last 3 years has really changed everything and will keep doing so because we ALL got a good hard look at the folks behind the curtain, their incapacity, mendacity, and their outright fabulism. we saw the towering arrogance and unchecked power and privilege.
but mostly, we saw the politics.
these are not scientists and science bodies, they are political agencies and grant grubbers and every time they are given a choice between science and performative policy prostration, you know which way they are going to go.
the woke/DEI virus outcompetes all others. it is ALWAYS the priority. and this is very dangerous because woke is the opposite of science and DEI is the antithesis of data.
that said, it’s also likely the cure for over-reliance upon and undeserved faith in public health agencies. this lets us see their true colors. and those colors are deeply unappealing.
it was bad enough watching public health abandon 100 years of evidence based pandemic guidelines to run off on a wild joyride with the world, closing it down and imposing implausibly draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, gatherings, and any other form of human association. the hectoring moral pose was prolific: stop being selfish, stay home, and stop the spread.
the world can wait.
but again, if you were not familiar with actual spread of respiratory viruses and standing pandemic policy it sounded, at least, plausible. it felt like it might be morality. this took in a great many people. how could it not?
but then things began to change.
for many, the first inkling that this was all rank nonsense came in the summer when suddenly the very same public health figures who had just gotten done extolling the dire necessity of keeping humans away from other humans and damn the costs or economic impacts were suddenly telling you that “structural racism” was the greater public health crisis and that getting together with a few hundred thousand pals for days on end to protest it was not only an exception to all these lockdown rules but a laudable and even vital act in service of public health.
“it’s science™!” they swore.
it was the dominant virus, more dominant even than the one we closed the world for.
oddly enough,
“you may not go to work and run your business because it’s unsafe, but gathering in the streets to burn that business down is the most important issue of our time and covid be damned”
did not go over terribly well.
this is the DEI virus, the politics of protected classes and of that which may not spoken, opposed, or resisted. it has infected government and especially public health top to bottom. everything is partisan and all morality is tactical because this is the entire function of the diversity, equity, and inclusion delusion: we get to do this and you do not. punch, no punchbacks!
and they are at it again.
this outcompete is once more on vivid display in monkeypox, a minor disease of little serious import that is spreading only in very narrow community confines and could, if anyone really wanted to, be stopped quite readily.
it’s being declared “an emergency” because, apparently, everything is and must be, but the facts of the matter are plain:
monkeypox is spreading as a disease of men who have sex with men. it spreads by direct intimate contact and rarely beyond that. most of spread vectors seem to lead to things like raves and sex parties where lots of casual sex between a great many partners is occurring.
the data here is nothing like subtle:
Among 291 men surveyed, 40% reported that they had two to four partners and 14% reported five to nine partners in the three weeks before developing monkeypox, according to the report. About 19% reported 10 or more partners during that period, the CDC said Friday.
And among 86 men who reported information, 28% said they had had group sex, which is defined as sex with more than two people, at a festival, group sex event or sex party, based on the report. The research was conducted from May 17 through July 22.
and neither is the response (or lack thereof). in fact, it’s astonishingly telling.
lockdowns, business closures, gathering bans, mandated protection, and contact tracing do absolutely nothing for an endemic respiratory virus. they cannot. they are the wrong tools for the job and could not possibly work even if implemented perfectly: they are the tools to address a different kind of pandemic.
in no small irony, that kind of pandemic looks EXACTLY like monekypox.
and yet the silence is deafening. all the same people who closed your bars and restaurants and schools will not utter even a peep about “hey, maybe we should close the clubs and bathhouses and the public sex spaces. maybe we should cancel that party.”
the same people who wanted vaccine passports and endless exclusion of the unvaxxed are suddenly on team “we cannot stigmatize people for their choices!”
the would-be covid contact tracers, now faced with a pathogen on which contact tracing actually works, demand privacy rights.
i mean:
it’s just wild. every single cherished covidian practice of utter inefficacy is now, when faced with a situation in which they would actually work, being treated like kryptonite because “well, we cannot do that to a protected class!”
could one imagine a more telling indictment of the true purpose and practice of modern day public health?
these people are commissars, not doctors.
personally, i am not in favor of granting public health powers to anyone, but granting them to these folks seems especially ill advised.
this may sound a little old fashioned and all, but:
i believe in personal responsibility:
if you care about monkeypox and want to mitigate your risk, it's not difficult.
if you don't, feel free to reap the consequences of your choices.
but don't come crying to me.
fair enough?
i mean, this is a pretty straightforward situation and it’s functioning just like other STD’s that have long been overexpressed in the male gay community.
but the push, of course, is NOT about personal responsibility. it’s about angling for ever more preference.
DEI dominates.
so gregg, what's so special about this as opposed to, say, cancer or leukemia or pneumonia or, dare i say it, vaccine injury?
why is this the one worthy of special treatment?
we need special care and special funding for those who caught rashes at sex clubs but we have nothing for kids with heart damage from a jab they got because they were forced to in order to attend their school or university?
this goes past "i support the new thing" shilling and into just plain “grift and grab” by highly active interest groups.
the moral inversions are stunning.
it is just breathtaking watching the same folks who favored withholding medical care from the unvaccinated for being “so irresponsible” now rend their garments and cry to the heavens of the great need for funding for the orgy injured. because it’s not their fault!
catching an aerosolized virus has been treated as some great moral failing of prevention and precaution, but coming home from ibiza with the monkey bumpies from stranger sex means that you are the victim here and we all need to rally around you?
this is public health?
look, i’m all for people making their own lifestyle choices, but i’m also for people facing the consequences. it’s really that simple. if you want to have lots of unsafe sex during what’s functionally an STD outbreak, well, that’s on you. but to then claim you need special treatment for your victimhood and that the world is ignoring the plight you brought on yourself, well, that one’s not really going to sell well with the most of us and provides a pretty poor pretext for health policy.
that’s outside public health and into partisan politics and “such a vast crisis that we want free drugs and free money but no, we’re not going to alter any behavior” is an unconvincing position for a community to adopt.
if it’s so serious, take the simple actions that would protect you. if it’s not, then don’t. these sorts of things are personal choices. it’s really not much of a public matter at all.
and yet health agencies seem determined to make it so.
covid was largely unavoidable (and vaccines sure did nothing to stop the spread). but monkeypox is if you take some simple precautions.
this, the “i should be allowed to live a life free of consequence while public health officials cheer-lead for me” is not really a valid framing. this really is one where protecting yourself is easy and where failing to do so speaks loudly about revealed preferences and senses of risk.
but perhaps most striking of all is the symmetry here of the community demands for freedom from consequence with the emerging position of public health who seems to want very much the same.
but it does not work like that.
you cannot recklessly spend credibility upon every changing pseudoscientific diktat leavened with absurdist social justice claims about “your little league game is a death-wish but my rarely peaceful protests of 10’s of thousands are just good public health in service of loftier goals” and expect to retain trust. this is a claim that makes people see through you. so is the endless refusal to even discuss much less countenance the policies to “stop spread” of monkeypox that you so recently declared moral imperatives around covid.
it’s clear double standards.
all this morality is tactical, all this policy just made up on the fly to serve the politically favored. there is not even consistency, much less morality or science.
and yet the loss of trust is being blamed on anyone but themselves. clearly, it’s “structural antivaxx” and “well funded, empowered anti-science” that must be to blame. it cannot be our own actions.
we’re the victims here. we, the structural oppressors are, in fact, the structurally oppressed. “i’m not a tyrant, you’re a tyrant!”
watching “metro policy experts” and school boards and public health flailures (probably not a word, but should be) seek to vilify the moms who “inexplicably don’t want to be dictated to by us anymore so they must be fascists!” is truly amazing and the tone deafness and in inability to self-image beggars belief.
truly, we’re past projection and into persecution fantasy.
these are institutions and ideologies tearing themselves apart.
good.
this will be the true pandemic to fight and eradicating the woke mind virus is going to be the most important public health action of our time. not covid, not monkey-bumps, but DEI. it has infected everything and the derangement of all other principles by it has been doing unspeakable damage and subverting the role of all our social institutions.
get inoculated. stand against it. speak against it until its cancel culture threats are rendered inert. make it clear that we, the actual majority have had enough of this petty tyranny and will brook no further imposition by it. this virus spreads because you fear it. the pandemic ends when we stop being afraid and start retaking the zeitgeist. the tide is turning here and it’s becoming OK to call these people out for the crybully frails and fakes they are. and they’re going to help us because they cannot help themselves. they will happily assist in their own undoings because shrieking for more special treatment is the only trick this pony knows.
it will be on more an more obvious display and all we need do is stop following these bankrupt sellers of division.
the time for sheep is ended.
this will be the time for lions.
Im an MD in private practice since 1999 in NJ. I also consider myself a libertarian in the style of Rothbard
The NIH has always been a corrupt illegitimate organization. There is no legal justification in the US constitution for its existence. Mixing politics and science/medicine/ health is doomed for disaster which is why the US constitution doesnt mention medicine science or health. Ive known my whole adult life that these orgs like NIH /CDC are political groups. They gave us the diastrous food pyramid in the 1970s and many other debacles scandals and failures
fauci heads the NIAID and yet during his tenure the prevalence and incidence of allergies and inflammatory conditions has skyrocketed. Fauci and the NIAID is a failure by every reasonable medical metric . But from a political standpoint these orgs have been sucessfull. The medical and pharm industry has been consolidated into larger and larger crony government controlled and financed cartel like arrangements. Costs have exploded, innovation stagnated. But the protected companies are happy. The incumbent pols and permanent bureacrats like fauci have profited. Its a example writ large of the failure of the merchantilist agenda first propounded by the likes of Hamilton and the federalists.
It’s completely naïve for anyone to assume that just because the NIH employees a bunch of scientists and doctors that they would be any less political or corrupt bankrupt and failed than Amtrak or Social Security, The post office, the federal reserve system or any other of a host of federal agencies even the supreme court
This stands opposed to the Jeffersonian tradition of maximum liberty.
At the root of all of this is the federal tax system: income , payroll, social security and The federal reserve system. All the money to fund these organizations comes from these two illegitimate areas. If we want medical and health freedom, innovation, and lower costs we have to eliminate the government bureaucracy involved in controlling these organizations. And the first step is to drastically cut back on federal taxes, government spending and eliminate the federal reserve system
I believed in the competence and integrity of the FDA/CDC so much back in early 2021 that I urged some of my loved ones to get vaccinated and got vaccinated myself.
How do I like the those agencies now? I will never trust the FDA/CDC again.