The monkeypox situation is bananas
On Aug. 1, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency for monkeypox. Many say that the situation doesn’t warrant an emergency, as to them it’s not severe. With deaths few and far between and less than 3,500 cases statewide as of Aug. 26, what’s there to worry about?
Newsom is making an emergency out of one that’s not there, they may say. But, being the contrarian politician-antagonist that I am, I would argue that the state is actually not doing enough to combat monkeypox.
If performance was solely based on lip service, they would be outstanding. Newsom stated when he declared the state of emergency that, “California is working urgently across all levels of government to slow the spread of monkeypox, leveraging our robust testing … to ensure that those most at risk are our focus for vaccines, treatment and outreach … We’ll continue to work with the federal government … and stand with the LGBTQ community fighting stigmatization.”
This sounds great in theory, but what steps are actually being taken?
Not much, as the state of emergency does not have enough real action behind it, and a lot still is left to be done. Vaccines are still limited and difficult to obtain, with specific sexual criteria required to get a single dose, let alone the following second booster. The eligibility begins and ends with being a gay/bisexual man or a transgender person who has had either (1) sex with multiple/anonymous people in the past two weeks or (2) intimate contact with people at large events in the past two weeks, alongside anyone who has engaged in commercial or transactional sex in the past two weeks.
Alongside the narrow criteria, a lack of education when it comes to monkeypox is worrying — many continue to compare it to or portray it as an sexually transmitted disease when it is far from the case. Monkeypox can still be spread through skin-to-skin contact and touching objects such as towels, bedding, clothing or even surfaces that have been contaminated with the virus. Despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that it is not a STD, but rather one transmitted through close contact, it has continued to be stigmatized and seen as one. With this, those who think monkeypox spreads strictly via sex may not take the necessary precautions to prevent its spread.
Most worryingly, there is still much unknown about the virus, such as whether asymptomatic people can spread it, and yet, no measures have been taken to curb its possible spread. To make matters worse, testing is only done on open lesions, thus data for monkeypox cases has several caveats. Cases are likely underreported and testing exclusively on open lesions represents only severe cases and fails to consider moderate or asymptomatic cases. It is within the realm of possibility that there is a wholly undetected spread of less severe monkeypox -— one without visible lesions — in non-queer communities, yet the way the media presents the virus continues to make it seem like gay sex is the only way it can be spread.
From this limited portrayal of monkeypox, homophobic stigma surrounds the virus in a way not dissimilar to the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. In an interview with Bloomberg, Stephen Thomas, director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, said, “If monkeypox is totally framed as an LGBTQ issue, then those individuals who do not see themselves part of the LGBTQ cultural community will not hear the message.”
Positioning monkeypox as a disease limited to gay men also does serve the state. In the same way public panic about the coronavirus was assuaged by positioning it as a disease for elderly folks — spoiler alert: Many younger people who have caught the disease now continue to face long-term effects — monkeypox’s depiction as a gay man’s disease may be used to quell further public panic, especially as there already is another ongoing disease to worry about.
Long story short, we’re living with three diseases running rampant: the coronavirus, monkeypox and Governor Newsom’s sickening failure of California residents. By simply declaring a state of emergency but not following it with adequate action, such as combatting the stigmatization and the stereotyping of the disease through educational campaigns, providing more funding for monkeypox research, having a detailed, proactive plan to curb the spread of the disease and especially, distributing vaccines to Californians more effectively, it almost feels as though we will make the same mistakes with the coronavirus pandemic whose spread still hasn’t ceased.
This is not to say that the emergence of cases should warrant panic or mass hysteria, but rather that our government should attend to it before it snowballs into something that does warrant a stronger reaction. Without the necessary actions, what can be a few sporadic cases can quickly turn into an epidemic — a lesson I thought we all learned after the past two years. How many times must we be taught our lesson before we learn from it?