Monkeypox: The Next Pandemic

Then I heard a loud voice from the temple telling the seven angels, “Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God.”

So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth, and harmful and painful sores came upon the people who bore the mark of the beast and worshiped its image.

As someone who enjoys a good medical horror story, monkeypox has all the signs of becoming one. The reason monkeypox is so scary, is because it is exactly NOT what people imagine it to be: An STD that affects gay men. It never was an STD in Africa and so it will never remain an STD.

For me to point this out however, gets me banned from Twitter:

I constantly troll and say offensive things on Twitter, but this earned me a seven day ban. This indicates to me that this is a sensitive spot: The difficulty of reconciling LGBTQI+, the modern state religion, with not having children drop dead from new pathogens crossing the species barrier. You can have gay piss-drinking orgies, you can have international travel and you can have 0.5% infant mortality rates. You can’t have all three of these simultaneously for very long however. After all, monkeypox is a pathogen that’s most dangerous to children and the elderly. It takes time to show up in those demographics, but it will.

So why are almost all the cases in gay men then? Imagine you had a virus that spreads by shaking hands. The first case is a college professor, who goes to an academic conference. It’s going to end up looking like a virus that preferentially infects academics. Gay men mostly interact with other gay men and so it will look as if it preferentially infects gay men if it starts out in their population, regardless of whether it has an intrinsic transmission advantage in gay men.

If you wish to understand why the world is now dealing with a monkeypox outbreak, you have to ask yourself: What changed? There are two scenarios worth considering: Either the virus itself has changed substantially through genetic mutation, or something about the environment in which it lives has changed in its favor.

As time goes by, the evidence increasingly points in one specific direction: The environment in which monkeypox is spreading has changed in its favor. This is the scenario I wrote about recently, here and here. If SARS-COV-2 damages those facets of the immune system that we would normally use to keep monkeypox out of our bodies, it would explain why we’re now witnessing a sudden uncontrollable pandemic.

India is also witnessing a rise in cases of monkeypox, but in India, cases belong to an entirely different strain from that causing the current global outbreak. And so rather than the virus itself suddenly having changed substantially, it would look as if its environment has changed.

Rather than just believing me, you can take a look at this post from Public Health Ontario, where they have also started saying the quiet part out loud: Our immune systems are being damaged:

After weeks without any monkeypox deaths outside of Africa, we’ve now seen three in three days.

Why did it take so long for the deaths to start piling up? Well, that’s the other important element of the horror story. I’ve already explained this on my Twitter account, which will probably receive a permaban soon, but I will repeat myself here.

Monkeypox, like any other virus entering our species from another animal, will either die out, or evolve into whatever form allows it to spread efficiently. For some viruses, like Ebola, this means they become less deadly over time.

But a virus like monkeypox, which had killed zero people outside Africa until a few days ago, will be under entirely different evolutionary pressure. If the virus is transmitted through the sores, there’s an incentive for the virus to produce more sores.

The downside of more sores is that the infection is easier for humans to recognize, but that’s unlikely to weigh up against the benefit of having more sores in infecting more people. Of course as humans, we don’t like having more sores. More sores means we’re more likely to die.

Officials in DC are warning their moneypox cases are getting more severe. As a poxvirus, monkeypox can be expected to evolve to try to fit into the niche of a human pox virus. Smallpox was once a mild virus, but in the 17th century it grew more virulent.

The virulence of smallpox was limited by dead people being bad at spreading it, as 30% of infected people died. Being able to recognize infected people was not sufficient to favor mild strains with few sores. In the 20th century, when we were well on our way to eradicating it, smallpox killed 300 million people.

Viruses evolve towards a niche, a kind of role in our microbiome that maximizes their ability to transmit themselves from one person to the next. It’s reasonable to assume that monkeypox will evolve (if given the chance) to resemble its close relative, smallpox.

The pox that cover our body are its vehicle for transmission. With more pox, we will be better at spreading it. With more pox, it will also cease to be dependent on sexual intercourse. As I have said multiple times, despite starting out as a sexually transmitted infection among gay men, this is not its end destination. Rather, it’s a stepping stone towards spreading the way orthopox viruses would normally spread among humans.

As time goes on and the virus grows less dependent on intense physical contact, we will see the relative share of cases outside gay men go up. This is already happening. The number of cases seen in women is rising faster than the total number of cases.

As I have explained before, in Africa, where monkeypox doesn’t spread through gay orgies, the r0 was estimated at 0.93. It seems that it’s only in men who participate in gay orgies, where the r0 lies well above 1. And so what I would expect, is that in the coming weeks, Western nations see the breathing pause scenario: The number of new cases will decline, as the virus runs out of men who participate in gay orgies.

The problem is however, that the virus itself will continue to change in the meantime. There will be a handful of people out there, who will end up infected with some variant that happens to have an r0 above 1 outside of men who participate in gay orgies. And in addition to this, there will be places where the spread of this virus can hardly be prevented: The favelas of Brazil, slums in Mumbai or Congo, places like New Zealand currently in the middle of winter.

Studies show the virus has already picked up mutations that increase its transmission potential in human beings, it will inevitably pick up more of such mutations as it infects more people. Some of you might wonder: Why doesn’t this apply to HIV, why should we expect monkeypox to stop behaving like a gay STD, when we have no such worry about HIV? Viruses are limited in their potential by their overall structure. With monkeypox we have every reason to expect it to stop behaving like a gay STD, because we know how it behaves in Africa. We also know how its closest relatives used to behave in humans. Monkeypox is very similar to smallpox, which never behaved like an STD. We thus have every reason to expect that for monkeypox “gay STD” is an evolutionary stepping stone, a transitory phase that will not last.

But the main question I am left with is as following: How will the vaccination campaign against monkeypox affect the evolutionary dynamics of this pandemic? The vaccination campaign of gay men was started with the idea that vaccinating enough of them will help extinguish this pandemic. What if we accept for a moment the idea that exterminating monkeypox is already impossible?

With the SARS-COV-2 vaccination campaign, we at least had evidence that suggested it would genuinely prevent infections. And we were at least using genetic material of the virus itself. With the current vaccination campaign, we’re injecting people with a different virus, that worked well against smallpox and seems similar enough to monkeypox to probably have some effect on monkeypox too.

Those of you who pay attention will have noticed what happened with SARS-COV-2: Mass vaccination induced some level of immunity in the population, but the people who were vaccinated were subsequently stuck with an inability to develop complete immunity against this virus. Breakthrough infections leave people with less protection against reinfection than infections in unvaccinated people do. The reason for this, which most of you will also be familiar with, is original antigenic sin: The first exposure was a poor fit, but the immune system is stuck recalling that first exposure.

If you think the Wuhan spike protein was a poor fit for subsequent SARS-COV-2 exposures, I’m now going to ask you:

How good of a fit is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ORTHOPOXVIRUS to monkeypox?

Are we now repeating the SARS-COV-2 mistake, leaving gay men stuck with an impoverished capacity to develop complete immunity against monkeypox?

Nobody can tell you. In fact, we don’t even really have good data on how effective this vaccine really is. We have a similar vaccine that was used in Congo and we have a study that it was 85% effective against monkeypox. Later studies found much lower effectiveness against monkeypox of about 50%, but this should be sufficient to demonstrate to you that we have no real clue what we’re doing.

With smallpox, we know that reinfections were possible, although they were very rare. People who were subject to intense exposure could succumb to reinfection. With monkeypox, we may find out that it’s possible too. Most American adults are immunocompromised. After all, what is obesity? It is a state in which your body is immunocompromised. It interferes with antibodies against influenza.

We have already seen the first monkeypox cases in people who were vaccinated:

Well look at that, the first breakthrough monkeypox cases are already here. https://t.co/JRzFJ6x4pj

— ???Rintrah Radagast?☠️??️? (@rintrahradagast) August 3, 2022

In the coming weeks, I expect we’re going to experience a breathing pause: Gay men are a minority of the population and men who participate in orgies will be a minority of gay men. This niche will be exhausted eventually. However, that merely means the virus goes through a bottleneck. It doesn’t mean the virus goes extinct. There will be places where variants emerge that manage to pass themselves on through regular contact. The favelas of Brazil may be a good example of a place where you just won’t manage to get rid of this virus.

But I hope that you all realize that this is a choice that you made. You embraced a new state religion, LGBTQI+. The highest sacrament of your new state religion consists of genital mutilation of mentally ill teenagers. And as a society, you have endorsed grooming children to join the eunuch caste, to dance for money, to dress up like the opposite gender.

Long ago, someone warned that you shall know false prophets by their fruit. Evil religions create human misery. LGBTQI+ is an evil religion, because its fruit consists of mentally ill teenagers who are mutilated by surgeons who make fortunes off their misery. This entire modern culture is a recipe for deep unfathomable misery.

Rather than being protected from themselves, the town freaks are put up on stage and upheld as modern saints, made out as some sort of example to emulate, even though they are clearly suicidal and deeply miserable.

It’s the greatest possible evil mankind can engage in, to take mentally ill traumatized people, people who feel dissociated from their own bodies due to trauma and mental illness and then to fool those people into thinking that having some fake penis made out of skin from their arm is going to solve their problems and that life will be delightful from that point onwards, turning their bodies into cash crops for surgeons and pharmaceutical industries that the rest of us end up paying for as insurance and governments will cough up the money necessary to turn them into walking Frankenstein monsters.

A society that engages in such crimes is so evil that it inevitably invites divine punishment upon itself. It becomes like Port Royal, the late 17th century center of piracy and the slave trade in the New World, until the 1692 earthquake killed most of its population. Our society has grown just as evil, the only reason you don’t see us trading human beings like cattle is because we have it so good, we live in such opulence that we have no need to display the depths of our inhumanity.

Monkeypox is the sort of misery you encounter in the Book of Nature that should make it clear to you that your state religion just doesn’t have God’s endorsement. But unlike HIV, which can be contained, monkeypox will evolve to become the sort of pathogen that jumps from person to person. Whereas gay men were HIV’s end destination, they’re a stepping stone for monkeypox.

It could take weeks, it could take months, I doubt it will take years, but it’s extremely naive to imagine that after orthopox viruses killed 300 million human beings in the 20th century that monkeypox will just turn into a gay nothingburger STD that hospitalizes a handful of sodomites before fading out into obscurity again. This thing is out there now and you’re not going to put the genie back into the bottle.