Where do people find the time to come up with these dumb ideas?
NEW YORK CITY has asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to rename the monkeypox virus to avoid stigmatising patients who might then hold off on seeking care.
New York has seen more cases of the disease, which the WHO declared a global health emergency over the weekend, than any other city in the United States, with 1,092 infections detected so far.
“We have a growing concern for the potentially devastating and stigmatizing effects that the messaging around the ‘monkeypox’ virus can have on … already vulnerable communities,” New York City public health commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a letter to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dated Tuesday.
The answer to that question – where do they get the time – is, of course, the monumental global explosion in lefty NGOs who literally exist for no other reason than to “tackle” problems like racism and stigmas and all that sort of thing. If there are no stigmas to be fought, then there is no need for the NGOs. God forbid, for the sake of all the traveller and LGBT NGOs in Ireland, for example, that Ireland is ever considered a prejudice free zone. They’d have to resort to a bit of gay bashing themselves, at that stage, just to keep the money flowing.
Is there anybody – and I do mean anybody – with an ounce of common sense in the world who genuinely thinks that “MonkeyPox” is a disease you only catch if you do something indecent with a monkey?
And if we were to re-name it, what would we re-name it to? Given that the disease is primarily transmitted between men who have sex with other men, any name based on the method of infection is obviously and self-evidently out of the running. Even hinting at the suggestion of that in this paragraph will probably be enough to have some NGO in Ireland denouncing me as a homophobe.
The disease is called monkeypox, incidentally, because it was first identified in captive monkeys. You know, the same way “bird flu” was first identified in…. birds. It would be a strange person, I’d suggest, who would hear that a person had bird flu and thought that the victim had some kind of unfortunate interaction with a seagull or a puffin.
The world is so stupid now, though, that I would predict with relative confidence that this “suggestion” will be adopted. It’s the kind of victory over language that progressives simply adore: Remember, if you will, the moral outrage in 2020 about linking Covid 19 – which originated in Wuhan, China – to China. In a matter of a few days, “The Chinese Coronavirus” went from a phrase being used by every respectable person to something only somebody like that terrible bigot, Donald Trump, would dream of saying.
And of course, by pointing out that Monkeypox is allegedly stigmatizing, the people making this call will paradoxically ensure that it becomes utterly stigmatizing and is used joyfully by those who feel they’ve been banned from saying it. After the attempt to curtail the use of “Chinese Coronavirus”, all sorts of new variants (ho ho) emerged: Wuhan Flu, Chinavirus, and so on. Every time progressives try this nonsense, they make the word they are trying to ban sort of transgressive and rebellious, and in a few months, we’ll have normal people getting called bigots for repeating what was on the RTE news yesterday, while dopey dreadlocked UCD students make a point of saying “Bubonovirus” or whatever the new name is, as often and as loudly as they can, watching carefully for any hint that anyone is laughing at them, so as to weed out bigotry.
This would all be funny, if it wasn’t so dumb. We’re going to keep calling it Monkeypox, here at Gript, regardless of what the WHO decides. Not because we want to stigmatise anybody, but because this, like so much of the world at the moment, is unutterably stupid.