About that Pox

I have been "la la la I'm not listening" about the so-called monkey pox, but I finally read this thread from the great Sarah Taber and found it enlightening.

Her main points:

• This disease is not new. It's one of a class of diseases (like cow pox) called orthopoxviruses that can live in many different kinds of hosts.
• Cowpox, for instance, was called that because Europeans noticed it in cows first, even though it was more in barn cats and barn rodents. The people just didn't notice it among those animals. Instead, they noticed it on the hairless udders of the cows because they were milking the cows.
• Monkey pox is called that because Western scientists first saw its symptoms in a shipment of lab monkeys they received... not because it was detected in wild monkeys in Africa, the way I (and possibly you) had assumed in my racism-fueled imaginations. 
• "Epidemiologists have been cautioning for years that cowpox, monkeypox, or another orthopoxvirus would probably become more common now that smallpox is off the table." Smallpox was so infectious that it effectively filled the orthopox niche, but with it wiped out by vaccines, that niche has been sitting empty for a while. "And since we're not even vaccinating for [smallpox] anymore, we got billions of people with no exposure to any orthopoxirus. So it's just easier for them to try people out as hosts than any time in the last few thousand years."

She ends with this:

Last of all, I just want to reemphasize that this is NEITHER

-A Gay Disease

nor

-A Climate Change Disease.

We're not having a monkeypox outbreak because climate change pushed species around.

Monkeypox has been endemic in parts of West Africa for a while, just like cowpox has been endemic in most of Europe for centuries or millennia.

What changed is we eliminated smallpox....

...it looks like this monkeypox strain may have been circulating around the world for at least a couple years before COVID even started. Most infections were simply so mild that most people didn't know they were infected.

Both the "gay disease" narrative of monkeypox and the "climate doom" narrative rely on the idea that monkeypox is new, and suddenly exploded out of West Africa in the last few months. In reality, it may have already been out here, undetected and causing relatively few symptoms.

In conclusion, with monkeypox I'm looking forward to doing more of the same shit I was already doing. Wash hands, mask, get vaccinated, and when authorities try to sell me on targeting marginalized groups to ~keep the doom at bay~ I'm gonna tell them to go fuck themselves.

And at the end of Taber's thread, she found that Hank Green has a short SciShow video along the same lines, so here it is. Hank added a couple of additional facts about the disease's origins: it probably originated in central African rodents (again: not monkeys), and the eponymous lab monkeys were shipped back in the 1950s.