Monkeypox virus: some truth about the virus and the horribly false solution

When NYC faced an HIV epidemic, it closed the bathhouses. It didn’t raise the status of its equity office, Rochelle. Simple, but it made a difference.

Monkeypox is a mild disease but the “pocks”
are a great annoyance, because we hate seeing and dealing with them.
In some areas, like the mouth and private parts, their downstream
effects can be rather painful. The pocks may result in scarring.

Let’s
face it: we don’t like dealing with pocks, especially the majority of
us who always want to look good. And so the media have taken our
distaste and projected it back to us, making the illness appear a lot
worse than it actually is. Most cases have only had a few pocks.

The disease (open pocks) lasts from 1-4 weeks. The viral syndrome (fever, malaise) only lasts a few days. CDC said to
its ACIP Advisory Committee on June 24 that only symptomatic care is
generally needed, and I think that is correct: drink fluids, rest. I
don’t think they necessarily want the rest of the population to know
that.

I think my case of measles around age 7 was probably worse—I had the things in my mouth and all over my body and eating and drinking was painful and I felt miserable. Here is what my measles looked like:

I am not sure how long people remain contagious with monkeypox; our public health officials have not informed us yet. From UptoDate:

… until the 2022 outbreak, transmission outside of a household and sustained human-to-human spread had been rare….Viral
shedding and period of infectiousness — A person is considered
infectious from the onset of clinical manifestations until all skin
lesions have scabbed over and re-epithelialization has occurred.

A
report of seven cases in the United Kingdom between 2018 and 2021
demonstrated polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positivity in blood and
upper respiratory tract samples for at least three weeks in three of the
patients. However, it is not clear what this means with
respect to infectivity, and the correlation of PCR and culture
positivity was not described in the report. Thus, PCR
testing of throat or blood samples is generally not done for clinical
decision making, and the duration of isolation is determined by clinical
evaluation.

Which means, treat the
lesions like we treat shingles, cause we don’t really know the duration
of contagiousness. If they told us you stop being infectious after a
few days or a week, it would seem milder, and the powers that be don’t
seem to want that.

Instead the PTB and media are really milking it. For example, writing in depth articles about this serious threat to the nation. Like this one from the WaPo,
which is desperately helping the USG to stay on top of the narrative,
after I and perhaps others spilled the beans about how much vaccine the
USG actually owns. (16 million doses, they say, but it could be more,
despending how much has been trashed.) My guess is none has been
destroyed and we probably have 30-40 million full doses, some of which
may have expired. Sitting frozen in Denmark, hidden from view. Excerpts
from the in depth article of August 17 are below, with commentary:

Chaplin
[CEO of the Jynneos manufacturer] threatened to cancel all future
vaccine orders from the United States, throwing into doubt the
administration’s entire monkeypox strategy.

“People are
begging for monkeypox vaccines, and we’ve just pissed off the one
manufacturer,” said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to comment.

Juice
up the story by creating a fake conflict. Make sure it hints of future
shortages. CYA by making it anonymous. BTW, this WaPo article includes 3
videos of three gay men showing off their lesions. Because the Yuck! factor is critical to sell the vaccines.

a plodding bureaucracy left hundreds of thousands of gay men facing the threat of an agonizing illness

Nobody has died after 10,000 US cases identified, so it better at least be agonizing. Occasionally.

Demetre Daskalakis, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was working from home on HIV prevention projects
over the May 14 weekend when CDC colleagues summoned him to an urgent
call as cases of unusual lesions had begun to appear in Britain.

Daskalakis quickly brushed up on the symptoms and origins of monkeypox.

“I
did the yeoman’s work of getting my infectious-disease biology textbook
out and just reviewing stuff about monkeypox to be ready,” Daskalakis
said.

Are you impressed? Senior CDC official
reads a few paragraphs in a textbook to bone up on monkeypox. What
about reading the original literature, bonehead, so you actually might
know something, given your responsibility for the entire country’s
response?

I have to tell you, I was at a discussion of anthrax
about 20-25 years ago with scientists from Fort Detrick and CDC
scientists (CDC made the decisions about handling the anthrax letters
response). David Ashford and Art Friedlander were there. The CDC people
were ignorant about anthrax then; they never had bothered to read the
primary literature. That’s why CDC let people keep working in the AMI
building in Florida for several days after anthrax was discovered, and
minimized the risk to postal workers.

Some things never change.

At
the time, the national emergency stockpile held 2,400 doses of Bavarian
Nordic’s Jynneos, the only vaccine approved by the Food and Drug
Administration for monkeypox. While the United States had purchased
millions more potential doses, they sat in Bavarian Nordic’s factory in
Denmark, either as finished doses in freezers or as raw materials,
waiting to be turned into vaccines.

The U.S. stockpile also had hundreds of millions of
shots of an older vaccine approved for the related smallpox virus,
ACAM2000, although health officials were wary of using that vaccine —
given the increased risk of side effects and even inadvertent illnesses —
and considered it a fallback.

But the Jynneos
doses in the stockpile were losing shelf life because its freezers were
capable of storing the doses only at negative 20 degrees Celsius, while
Bavarian Nordic’s freezers in Denmark kept doses stored at negative 50
degrees Celsius.

Before, the media and CDC
said the ACAM-2000 stockpile was “at least 100 million.” After I
pointed out we bought 300 million doses back in the early 2000s and
plenty more since, the story got updated to hundreds of millions. The
ACAM-2000 production company is now under the ownership of the anthrax
vaccine manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions. Which means there will be
no quality control on vaccine production. This company had to throw
away nearly 400 million COVID vaccine doses due to contamination. The taxpayer’s loss. Congress said so: 

Committees’ Report on Emergent
BioSolutions Uncovers Extensive Vaccine Manufacturing Failures,
Deliberate Efforts to Hide Deficiencies.  May 10, 2022

Okay,
so the US had already spent around $1.6 billion on the Jynneos vaccine,
intended mainly for smallpox, before monkeypox showed up in May. The
company had been producing doses for the USG since 2013 or a bit
earlier. But the WaPo, the USG mouthpiece, is hinting to us that the
government was too cheap to buy the necessary freezers to store it, and
that is the excuse why they have been sitting in Denmark? AYFKM?

No, they weren’t kidding.

Shipping the doses would create additional challenges in keeping the vaccines as cold as possible for their 4,000-mile voyage to the United States.

“Every time we move doses from their freezer to the [stockpile] … we lose two years of shelf life,” said Dawn
O’Connell, head of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and
Response, which oversees the national stockpile. “Every time we convert
doses from [raw materials] to a vial, we lose seven years of shelf
life.”

Wait, what? Nearly the entire
stockpile of tens of millions of doses has been produced in the past 9
years, and Assistant Secretary of HHS O’Connell just talked about them
losing 9 years of shelf life when they get shipped and bottled. Sounds
like they must be starting with more than 9 years of shelf life at minus
50 C. Which suggests virtually none of the stockpile expired, after
earlier claims that 20 million doses had expired.

Didn’t the USG know this before spending $1.6 Billion to have them manufactured and stored in bulk in Denmark?

Wasn’t
the purpose to buy this huge stockpile of vaccine in case of a smallpox
emergency? Don’t you need to get it over here pronto when that
happens? Like yesterday? Who is blowing smoke by implying there was no
plan to rush this stuff from Denmark into arms in days or at most a few
weeks, had smallpox occurred?

Early on, every
monkeypox test required physicians to first get permission from a city
or state epidemiologist, often an hours-long process that required
multiple phone calls or emails — before the sample was sent to a public
health laboratory, which could take days to release results.

Just
like at the start of COVID, CDC controlled all US monkeypox testing.
[I don’t know why they did this, but this is one way to control the
number of reported cases. And maybe to let it spread more?] Only CDC had
the test, and it wasn’t until around July 1 that CDC shipped tests to
public health labs and commercial labs and allowed them to do testing as
well.

The restrictions created a chokehold: Only about a dozen tests per day were being performed nationwide in early June,
at a time when officials believed hundreds or thousands of daily tests
were needed to detect infection clusters and head off an outbreak.

Sound familiar?

And communicating the risks of monkeypox to the public was proving to be a challenge, with officials struggling to warn the gay men who were disproportionately contracting the virus, often through sex with multiple partners, while not stigmatizing them.

This
stigmatizing BS is a bad joke. Public health officials have been doing
contact tracing for syphilis, for example, forever. No one ever said
it would stigmatize the polyamorous, or sex workers. All the data are
supposed to be strictly confidential. It’s what you do to save lives
and prevent fetal malformations. Warn those at risk, dammit. Don’t
stigmatize them. Inform them. Keep it confidential. You already have
the syphilis protocols and know how to do this. Stop playing coy.
Couldn’t CDC come up with a better excuse for not doing its job?

The job today: explain the nation’s plan to split vaccine doses in fifths
and administer them with a new injection method, transforming about
441,000 doses of Jynneos into more than 2 million potential shots. The
plan was finalized by the FDA over the pharmaceutical company’s safety concerns and after the company backed away from its CEO’s threat to cancel future orders.

So
we are ‘unable’ to quickly get the Denmark 16 plus millions of doses
shipped and bottled for use. The vaccine is fully licensed and legally
could very well have liability attached to it if injuries occur (and
plenty will-I previously wrote about very high numbers of recipients in
the clinical trials with elevated cardiac enzymes and worsening HIV
status). Hello Rochelle and Tony, was this deliberate? Instead of
worrying about stigmatizing, are you warning HIV positive people that
the vaccine is known to cause higher HIV virus titers and lower CD4
counts?

And then there is this: the USG is ‘able’ to get the
already bottled doses sucked out of vials, diluted and totally rebottled
as diluted product, never having undergone testing of the process,
whether it works, whether the dose makes sense. The administration
announced it will be doing that, which is not simple.

But they
can’t just defrost and bottle the bulk vaccine? Seems to me it is a lot
more complicated to remove, dilute and rebottle than to simply bottle
what we already own. Especially since we own plenty. Buy the freezers,
ship the stuff over, and have US companies bottle it. That is, if we
really need it and this whole thing is not a clown show.

The
diluted product got an EUA on August 9, which removes essentially all
liability. How convenient. Maybe that is why the USG is diluting it?
Or will they just bottle the old vaccine, call it diluted, and still get
the liability waiver?

BTW, the intradermal injection method is the exact same method used when doing a TB test. Not hard to learn or to do.

So
many gay men across the country still struggling to get vaccinated. A
second dose needed 28 days after the first shot. At least 14 days after
the second dose for full protection.

Full
protection? STAT, as I previously noted, recently carried an Op-Ed by 2
former top officials at FDA on the monkeypox vaccines. They revealed
that the Jynneos vaccine does not prevent transmission! It supposedly
reduces severity of the disease. Except it is mild to begin with.

Where have we heard that
before? Go get vaccinated, risk myocarditis or a worsening of HIV, wait
42 days for “full protection” from a diluted dose (or not) that has
never been tested in humans—and then find out you can still catch and
spread monkeypox.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

UPDATE Aug 20:

Breakthrough monkeypox cases emerge

Preliminary reports on monkeypox vaccinations suggest the vaccine is not 100 percent effective, and some breakthrough cases are occurring, the World Health Organization said during an Aug. 17 media briefing. 

In
some cases, breakthrough infections are occurring in people vaccinated
after a monkeypox exposure, which is intended to reduce disease
severity. The breakthrough cases should not come as a surprise,
as the WHO was not expecting 100 percent efficacy, according to Dr.
Rosamund Lewis, the organization’s technical lead for monkeypox. [Is it a surprise to the gay men lining up for hours for a shot at the shot?—Nass]

“We have known from the beginning that this vaccine would not be a silver bullet,
that it would not meet all the expectations that are being put on it,
and that we don’t have firm efficacy data or effectiveness data in this
context,” she said.

Dr. Lewis cited a
limited study from the 1980s, which showed that smallpox vaccines used
at the time were about 85 percent effective against monkeypox. [It used a different vaccine, believed to be much more effective than Jynneos, however.—Nass]

She said it’s unclear what the current vaccine’s overall efficacy will be, but still stressed the importance of vaccination to protect those at high risk.