I Don’t Want to Live on This Planet Any More

This is QAnon level stuff.

In case it's not obvious, what public health officials try to anticipate future threats and figure out how to ameliorate them.

Monkeypox has been an obvious candidate as an emerging infectious disease since before I wrote about that in 2003.

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

So they studied it.

I and many many other people more knowledgable about orthopoxviruses have been pointing for decades at monkeypox as a potential emerging pathogen. And you can find those articles easily in the scientific literature. https://t.co/oO6M3f3hD6 pic.twitter.com/7Gv07NczWI

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

I weep for the children.

On a more serious note, worries about monkeypox, a member of the same genus as smallpox, has been an object of concern for years.

As to the Brownstone Institute, they are literally an organization opposed to public health measures of all forms, because, Ayn Rand, I guess.

I used to laugh at these folks, but seeing as how they are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of people world wide, I don't think that laughter is the appropriate response.

We're just lucky that the current outbreak, which includes community transmission, is of the West African clade, with a mortality of around 3% untreated, as opposed to the Congo Basin clade, which has a mortality rate above 10%.