Ramping up the fear machine, but why?

If at first you don't succeed...

I was putting together material for one of the courses I teach and I thought I should looking to this Monkeypox global emergency.  What warranted calling it a global emergency? Let’s see what the mainstream media tells us.

This article gives a pretty high number of cases, but 96% of them are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Twelve other countries have cases in Afirca.  So that’s not global.  This article and many others note that different demographic groups are affected, compared to the previous Mpox outbreak. Interestingly, lots of the articles that came up on google say the exact same thing – same figures, etc.  Gotta love having that central news service.

Let’s look at the public health agencies:

CDC’s webpage isn’t even being updated anymore:

No, I didn’t go to the wrong page.  When you google Monkeypox CDC, this is the page it takes you too. This screenshot below came from the spot where it links the outbreak from 2022-present.  They are sure to let you know there is a vaccine though!

You know what’s interesting?  When I actually did these web searches a few days ago, I found websites that explicitly said there were zero cases in the US currently.  Now those aren’t coming up in my search.  Curious.

Let’s try WHO’s webpage… which apparently also hasn’t been updated for a year?

If you look for Africa data specifically, it is there.  With actual counts. 

I checked my state’s Monkeypox dashboard – looks like it is still just sitting there from 2022. 

This is really interesting to me.  I literally only started looking stuff up about this one day ago, and now I’m seeing less information from the actual public health sites than from the mass media.   I could check a way back machine but don’t have time for that.  I guess I’m going to make a different point here than I set out to make initially. 

If this is such a “global” emergency, why aren’t the public health agencies updating their websites with current numbers? The mass media has more fear it in than the actual public health sites.  This has been declared a “global” emergency and it hasn’t even crossed the Atlantic.  The news is full of stories and no one is even saying “It’s not in the US yet”.  The obvious public health intervention here is to not allow people to travel to those African countries, or let people from those countries visit the US, you know, like they did with Ebola a few years ago… but that isn’t mentioned by a single article.  Is that intentional? 

(When I searched for a thumbnail figure, even the internet gave me one from 2022!)