Though monkeypox can be transmitted between humans, it isn’t nearly as transmissible as Covid-it usually requires close contact to spread, says Derek Walsh, a microbiology and immunology professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. The disease, which causes flu-like symptoms and painful lesions and is fatal in about 3-6 percent of cases, is endemic in parts of Africa, where outbreaks can often be traced back to contact with animals. The total count now exceeds 250 across 16 countries. Let’s dispense with a few facts for some context: The monkeypox outbreak isn’t even a month old the World Health Organization reported the first cases on May 13. As Yale epidemiologist and AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves put it on Twitter earlier this week, this might be “that moment when homophobia meets far right pandemic politics.” The addition of homophobic rhetoric is particularly toxic, as it’s likely to unite anti-LGBTQ extremists with Covid denialists. But the monkeypox outbreak offers especially fertile ground because it allows the purveyors of misinformation to recycle many of the same talking points that they developed for Covid. Recently, I’ve reported on anti-vaccine influencers’ embrace of pro-Kremlin ideology and their promotion of dangerous disinformation about the baby formula shortage. There is seemingly no topic too far afield for these zealots to exploit. He managed to build upon his previous talking points and pivot to the current news cycle, neatly weaving the latest headlines into a grand conspiracy theory with necessary villains and egregious profiteering.
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With those two points-a supposedly overblown illness plus some homophobia-Berenson did what anti-vaccine activists do best.
Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then.” “Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure?… Okay. “Are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men?” he wrote. In a post titled “Is It Monkeypox or Crystalpox?” Berenson writes that public health authorities have “almost got another epidemic on the go-the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media from the complete failure of the mRNA vaccines.” He then goes on to argue that monkeypox is strictly a disease of gay men. Berenson’s Substack newsletters over the last month have mostly been more of the same: He rails against “woke media whoppers about Covid vaccines” and describes Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman as a “fat vaccinated cannabis activist.”īut earlier this week, Berenson took aim at a new target: the growing global outbreak of the monkeypox virus. Before Twitter kicked him off the platform for spreading vaccine disinformation last year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers.
One of Berenson’s favorite themes has been to downplay the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines-and it’s this work in particular that has made him a star. In his Substack newsletter “ Unreported Truths” he rails against Joe Biden, derides the pro-choice movement, and complains about inflation to his “tens of thousands of subscribers.” But over the last several years, he’s increasingly focused on a new pet project: owning the libs. Once upon a time, Alex Berenson was a New York Times journalist covering major stories, from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina to the Bernie Madoff scandal.
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