As if we had not learned our lessons from the great disaster that has been the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, we are about to do it again with a vaccine for monkeypox of unknown efficacy.
As recently as 3 October, CNN reported: ‘Globally, there have been more than 68,000 monkeypox cases and 25 confirmed deaths in the current outbreak, according to the World Health Organization’ which translates to a negligible infection fatality rate of 0.036%. Hardly a global emergency. Yet the daily mailshot from Global Health Now (GHN) the newsletter of the Panic-Monger Generals of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (a combination of words that should strike fear into the hearts of any thinking person) of 2 November is headed ‘Monkeypox Still an Emergency’. A link is provided to an article from BusinessDay about the DRC where monkeypox has long been endemic headed, in an alarmist tone: ‘Desperate DRC patients suffer without shots in monkeypox outbreak’ and claims that: ‘More than 130 have died in poor African countries where many lack quick access to health facilities or are unaware of the dangers.’ Yet another article from Reuters (based on the same sources as the BusinessDay article) of 31 October emphasises: ‘The Africa CDC says that Congo has had more than 4,000 suspected and confirmed cases and 154 deaths this year’.
I am unable to reconcile these figures which are clearly conflicting. Either the figures for the current global monkeypox outbreak do not include the figures for Africa, suggesting that they hardly matter as much as lives in the developed countries, or someone is making stuff up. But it is also hard to understand why GHN and Reuters would report the figures from Africa separately, until you read the articles. This is about vaccines and the supposedly dire need for them in Africa.
This Reuters piece points out at the end of the article that of the ‘human interest’ people they mention in their article: ‘None of them…had access to vaccines or anti-viral drugs.’ These having been snapped up by the greedy west. The BusinessDay piece really lays it on thick quoting a local resident in DRC who says: ‘We demand the government provides medicines for us poor farmers, and the vaccine to fight this disease’ and a nurse who says: ‘If there is a vaccine, it is us who should have it. If there is a treatment, it is us who should have it.’ Another says: ‘We want there to be a vaccination campaign’
To these people, I would say ‘be careful what you ask for’. If Mr Bill Gates and his vaccine obsessed cronies hear their call, they will soon have more vaccines than food. Gates & Co will be only too keen to sell them a medical pup. They should bear in mind that there are currently two approved vaccines for monkeypox—both with alphabet soup names JYNNEOS and ACAM2000 —and here is what the CDC in the USA has to say about them: ‘No data are currently available on the clinical efficacy or effectiveness of JYNNEOS or ACAM2000 for monkeypox disease.’
In other words, nobody knows if these vaccines work but it must be nice for the vaccine arm of Big Pharma to have a large and willing population in which monkeypox is endemic on which to experiment.
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