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WHO declares monkeypox a public health emergency (statnews.com)
175 points by l1n on July 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 201 comments



When it first started spreading outside of Africa I was concerned because the reported fatality rate was something like 5-10%

Now we have tens of thousands of cases outside of Africa and it doesn’t appear to be lethal at all and goes away on its own. Depending on the severity it seems like the biggest issue is pain/itchiness for a week or so.

So what’s the “emergency” in that context?


I'd hazard the WHO discomfort with "wait and see" is (1) lingering institutional shame at failing to warn about SARS-CoV-2 in a timely manner, (2) unexpectedly high transmissibility and geographic spread, (3) it's an orthopoxvirus, and while distant from smallpox... it's not that distant, (4) largely unvaccinated world population, and (5) history of diseases which are circulating in men-who-have-sex-with-men being ignored (read: HIV).

Honestly, IMHO, this is what the WHO should be doing: looking at the potential for pandemics and making moves ahead of time. (2) & (4) should be enough to scare the crap out of anyone who accepts the possibility of mutations once it's more widely circulating.

Smallpox is objectively horrific, and its eradication was one of public health's greatest modern triumphs. So anything close should be taken seriously.

Not panic. But pragmatic seriousness.

(WARNING: Not for the faint of heart) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox


> Not panic. But pragmatic seriousness.

the very nature of an "emergency" does cause panic, though. from what you are describing I don't see how that word can be justified. sounds more like "public health threat" or sth like that.


The problem is expressing the situation as urgent but not yet out of control in a clear and concise way that doesn’t leave the reader/listener with the idea that the problem is one that can be ignored because it is not out of control yet.

We have lots of language to say this sort of thing, but the more words you add the easier it is to be misunderstood. On a sociolinguistic level we do sort of overuse the word “emergency” but it’s primarily because we tend to do most of our “highest priority” communication with chunks of words that fit in a sound byte, or newspaper headline, or bullet point that fits on a PowerPoint slide ,or tv news lower third.


I agree with the use of emergency when desired outcome is people seeing the situation as urgent, but all this does is kick the can.

At some (I feel like close) future point, people will see “emergency” and equate it to “someone’s being cautious. This is possibly not a problem at all and therefore can be ignored.”

What’s that old saying along the lines of “intentionally use more subtle language in your writing because it gives you room to be intense later.”?


but what can be done now practically? with covid it was easy to come up with measurements - but monkeypox? I am already using condoms at the local swinger club


And here’s the failure to communicate that most concerns me… this isn’t HIV, it’s got multiple routes for infection and covering one with a condom does nothing to stop you catching it via another route.

Money pox can be transmitted via infected bodily fluids, via via contact with the blisters/lesions/“rash” that forms, via inhaling droplets of infected fluids (simplest example, heavy breathing + sweaty bodies very close together), and potentially any method where infected fluids from one body come into contact with the mucous membranes of another person, so that’s the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Also it can contaminate surfaces so there’s a risk of infection via contaminated bedding. Only one of these is mitigated by a condom.

Effectively the only preventative options are vaccinations and avoiding exposure via the normal ways, trying to not come into contact with anyone infected (the “avoiding high risk behaviour” option) and by wearing personal protective equipment such as disposable gowns, gloves, masks... which is basically all the sort of things medical staff do to prevent the spread of all sorts of diseases around hospitals, but its a whole list of stuff you need to do and remember to do right, to the point where medical staff need training and spot checking to ensure they do it right all the time... understandably its not something the public is very well equiped to do.

Oh and it’s infectious before it’s “obvious that you have monkeypox” since the first early few days the various skin symptoms could be mistaken for a zit or pimple or other skin reaction and don’t necessarily start somewhere you regularly look at, such as behind the ear.

The wikipedia article is actually pretty informative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox other than not having a clear idea yet what's different about the new strain spreading around, we actually know quite a bit about monkeypox since its endemic to certain African animals there has been cases to study for decades, and the fact its related to the much more deadly Smallpox virus (the Smallpox vaccine is apparently 85% effective against Monkeypox) means its been an interesting virus for researchers to study, basically since we started trying to wipe out smallpox decades ago.

Edit: Missed a key point. The extra trouble is they need to "thread the needle" with their messaging to ensure what they are saying isn't misinterpreted as pointing the finger at the MSM (men who have sex with men) since they have mountains of evidence on how badly handled everything was with HIV/AIDS. They don't want the regular public assuming this is a disease only gay people can get, because its not, but the kinds of activities that are most likely to cause you to catch it are most commonly associated with gay men, which is sort of at odds with their first goal.


Everything is about context. The context in this case it that the WHO declaring an emergency might sound ominous, but I don't see the panic you are decrying. And I'll hazard a guess, you will not see panic from this declaration. I think this will be proof the WHO was historically scared of acting too quickly, particularly with COVID, and should not have. A declaration of an emergency by the WHO is not a source of panic, it's the start of a muscled response by health organizations around the world.

I feel safer that the WHO has declared an emergency, and so does the rest of the world.


The next level for the WHO is pandemic, right?


[flagged]


Worldwide organizations operate across national boundaries via consensus and voluntary agreement.

Off the top of my head, the only forceful worldwide organization we have is the UN Security Council, which is finely calibrated. And historically predicated on ownership of nuclear arms.

Consequently, the job of every other worldwide organization is to (a) build political goodwill with nations & (b) spend that political goodwill to urge them to take actions, when the situation calls for it.

If those nations dig their heels in, it becomes a choice. Do you want to burn bridges because the current situation is that important? Or do you want to let things slide to maintain the relationship and preserve future goodwill?

Hint: There isn't an obvious right answer. Especially when you're looking forward at a novel, uncharacterized pathogen with unknown effects.


> maintain the relationship and preserve future goodwill

If the relationship involves lies and cover ups that caused this pandemic to get out of control leading to millions of deaths and massive global disruption, what is the value of the relationship in the future?


Are you expecting a pandemic-less future?


If the relationship still involves lies and cover ups that caused a future pandemic to get out of control leading to millions of deaths and massive global disruption, what is the value of the relationship?


That it's still better than the no-worldwide coordination body alternative?

An optimal but impossible-to-implement world organization isn't a useful measuring stick for organizations that need exist in reality.

Nations exercise sovereignty within their borders. Nations have their own priorities. Those priorities often conflict with other nations'. Inconvenient in public health responses, but facts that must be dealt with.

And in a choice between (1) no WHO, (2) a WHO that spends time playing politics and is less effective than it could be, (3) a perfectly-efficient authoritarian WHO supported by a global police state... I'll take (2).


They are expecting a lie-less, and politic-less future. :)


> Off the top of my head, the only forceful worldwide organization we have is the UN Security Council, which is finely calibrated.

It is utterly and completely locked up and has been for years because the worst threats to international security (Russia and China) have been blocking anything against them or their interests.


It has not been "utterly and completely" locked up for years. Each member has been acting in its own interests, but even in times of poor international relationships, there is sometimes agreement by all on a particular matter.

https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/volumes-resolutio...


The key thing is, the UNSC was established to prevent nuclear war between the super powers.

While it has been successful on that front, it has utterly, utterly failed however in preventing a repeat of what happened between 1933-1945 in Germany, which was the reason for why the UN was founded:

- China is genociding off Tibetans and Uyghurs for many years and no one seems to be willing to put a stop on that. Not to mention Chinese fishing vessels illegally fishing as far as Africa or continuous Chinese imperialist aggression against its neighbor states.

- Russia... well, the current invasion in Ukraine speaks for itself, but there has been more. Alone the land grab of the Krim 2014 should have been more than enough to warrant intervention.

- Syria, where Assad (with a lot of assistance from Russia and its Wagner mercenaries) has liberally broken every red line the Western nations set. Barrel bombs against civilians, genocide, nerve gas, torture, and that's just the rough list.

- the collapse of Libya and its descent into civil war and chaos

- a boatload of other conflicts turning into ethnic cleansings and genocide across Africa

- a lot of nations in South America falling under the effective control of drug cartels

About the only horror stopped by the UNSC was the self-proclaimed Islamic State, and that was only because both Russia and China didn't want anything to fuel their local Islamist-extremist insurgent groups.


I love how none of this mentions an illegal war based on lies. Feel like things are slightly biased.


I shed no tear for dictatorships.


Funny how you’re bringing China, while completely ignoring the worlds most aggressive country: the US. You bring up the “genocide”, while again ignoring much worse situation in American prisons - two million victims, all kinds of systemic human rights violations and abuse, documented forced labor on mass scale. But sure, China bad.


Don't all permanent members do the same though?

It seems to me like that is the point of beingn a permanent member, above everyone else.

Otherwise, what's the point of being one if you won't block things that are against your interest?

Not saying I like, it but nuclear weapons tend to give a lot of leverage.


Calling Russia and China the worst threats to international security in times where the USA and NATO not only exist, but are a as active as ever, could be explained only by the complete unawareness of any major event of the post WW2 history.


Source?


There is plenty of reading material[1] if you're really interested.

[1] https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZLBR&pc=MOZI&q=the+WHO+pr...


A Bing search is not a credible source, and I'm not seeing anything to support what you're saying.


It is the first poxvirus to spread across the globe since the eradication of smallpox. Vaccines exist, unlike at the outset of Covid, but not at the scale necessary to vaccinate the world and move on.

Even if monkeypox is only an annoyance (which I doubt), if 7 billion people all have to get sick for a week, that deprives humanity of ~134 million people-years of life that they'd rather spend doing something else -- even if there are no longer-lasting impacts.


Getting sick for a week is part of life. We have made things too comfy already.


> It is the first poxvirus to spread across the globe since the eradication of smallpox.

How do you figure? I got chickenpox in the 90s.


Chickenpox is caused by varicella zoster, which is a herpes virus. Which is why it can linger and re-emerge as shingles decades later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varicella_zoster_virus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Cause

Similar symptoms, substantially different family trees.


If it disfigures you just the same as monkeypox, is it a distinction with a difference?


Yes, because it’s a different disease. Radiation sickness will give you burns, but normal burn ward treatments won’t work on it.


> Yes, because it’s a different disease

So are monkeypox and smallpox, right? Related, but different diseases.

So are this year's strain of influenza, and the Spanish Flu. Related, but different diseases. Should extant monkeypox cause more alarm than extant influenza?


“Related” being the operative word. Chickenpox is not meaningfully related to the virus family that causes smallpox and monkeypox.

Nothing is a priori worthy of more or less alarm. Public health officials raise a degree of alarm based on the best epidemiological, medical, and demographic information available to them.


I'm talking about the relationship between monkeypox and smallpox, vs the relationship between 2022's influenza and the spanish flu. These are both respectively in the same virus families. No?

Smallpox is concerning, monkeypox as it is today isn't very concerning. If I understand the comments in this thread, the great concern is that monkeypox could become something quite deadly like smallpox was.

Is that risk substantially greater than the risk of a new influenza that rips through the population like the Spanish Flu once did?


These are questions for your public health officials, not me. I’m merely invested in correcting your previously incorrect statements; any questions of epidemiology are best left to them. Presuming that you’re interested in their answers, of course.


The other note I'd make is industrial vaccination capacity. We've gotten pretty damn good at identifying, synthesizing, manufacturing, and distributing influenza vaccines at scale on a yearly basis.

If a deadly influenza strain is in our future, we're decently prepared.

On the other hand, we haven't manufactured or administered human pox vaccinations at scale in... 50 years?


Flu shot effectiveness averages around 35-40%. It used to be higher on average and has been dropping over the past decade.


We understand how the flu behaves. We've had >100 years of flus and Spanish Flu only happened once.

The only experience we have with poxes in humans is smallpox and monkeypox. Smallpox was not a good time. Past monkeypox outbreaks have killed 5%. This one is behaving very differently, but we don't know if it's going to revert to killing people! It has in the past, like every outbreak, so it's a rational worry.


Endemic seasonal influenza didn't just recently acquire the ability to jump to humans. Even considering the 2009 H1N1 pandemic the H1 protein is descended from the human strain which circulated in 1918-1957 and there was still enough immunity in the human race in 2009 to make that virus not that novel. This monkeypox virus is brand new to the human immune system.


It’s not quite as simple as stating they are different diseases.

These diseases are caused by single celled organisms which keep spawning clones rather than having sex among a population. So the point you call a different COVID or influenza strain a different disease is effectively arbitrary unlike with sexual species where you can draw the line when they can’t breed with each other.


The difference between monkeypox and smallpox is arbitrary?

How many people are dropping dead from it? It doesn't seem like an arbitrary distinction to me.


Different strains of monkeypox and smallpox have wildly different fatality rates.

Variola minor is a strain of smallpox with fatality rates under 1%, while some strains of monkey pox are believed to kill 10% of the infected.

In the end where exactly we draw the line within https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopoxvirus is arbitrary, but not without justification.


Wow you are really doubling down on being right about a statement that was factual wrong ...


> The difference between monkeypox and smallpox is arbitrary?

All differences between two things is always arbitrary. This is something I wish more people understood. Two different things are never the same thing. You can come up with similarities based on arbitrary criteria, and that's all.

For example, what we consider make two different person a woman is arbitrary criteria that we just all agree on, or debate forever.

> How many people are dropping dead from it? It doesn't seem like an arbitrary distinction to me

You want to engage in that "forever debate of semantics", but I don't think that's your point.

Currently, it's agreed on taxonomy that chickenpox is not on the same family as monkeypox and smallpox. That's just agreed upon arbitrary categories.

Now the arbitrary doesn't mean useless. Often categories are chosen based on some practical aspect. For example it helps to group them if they have a similar behavior in some way that is often helpful to group in the default case.

An example of this is how in culinary science, a Tomato is made a Vegetable, because it's more useful to club vegetables around their flavor profile. You most of the time don't want to use a Tomato for a recipe that calls for fruits. But in botanical science, flavor isn't useful, it's more useful to think in terms of what contain seeds, thus a Tomato is made a fruit.

Each science uses their own arbitrary classification based on what is more practically useful for their line of research.

Ok, so I think your point isn't to try and tell virologists that their chosen taxonomy isn't as optimal for their line of research. But that in the case of public policy and messaging, virulence might be more important.

Even though both virus are of the same family, there is still a major difference in their virulence. And maybe that property holds more weight in this case.

I think that's a great point, but that you were arguing wrong by attacking the definition instead of bringing up the characteristic of importance and explaining why.

Now this is as much as I know of virology, so I can't say if there are good reasons to be worried about the chances of virulence changing because they are in the same family or not. But I'd say you're right, virulence is what the public cares about, and it be nicer for virologist to explain the chances of the virulence getting worse through some mutations and if they think it's high, why, or if they think it's low, why.


It's the difference between being worried that a dog is going to act wolf-like, versus a chicken is going to act wolf-like.

The herpes lineage is no joke, especially given recent evidence for long-term effects, but Orthopoxviruses has some nasty members (for humans and other economically-important species).


So it's not about Monkeypox as it exists today, but a fear of what Monkeypox might become if it changed into something it presently isn't? Because as it is, it seems to kill very few people but gives people disfiguring scars. Like chickenpox.


I can't speak for the WHO, but that would be my assumption.

And when I say "nasty Orthopoxviruses," I mean ~25% case fatality rate in the affected species, with an increased fatality rate in infants. So... pretty horrible stuff. :(

These numbers seem squishy (keep an eye on the situational caveats they note for a specific row), but lists relative CFRs for different diseases. Chickenpox probably isn't going to kill you, unless you're a pregnant mother who acquires it in a specific window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...


The repeated mentions of chickenpox are weird. Apart from ending in the same sequence of three characters chickenpox and monkeypox/smallpox have nothing in common. The name similarity is accidental.


A linguistic artifact from a time when we classified diseases by symptoms, because we had not yet acquired our modern genetic tools. :)


A different "species" of a virus is as different as you or I are from a dog, so yeah it's a distinction that matters.


[flagged]


> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.


“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” - Arnold Schwarzenegger


I try to bring my best self to HN in all comments. It was a good question.


Despite the name, the virus that causes chickenpox is classified as a herpes virus, not a pox virus.


This comment does not contribute anything to the discussion.

I think chickenpox spread before smallpox in any case?


Based on what politicians like the head of the WHO learned from Covid, you can't go wrong with a strategy of "better safe than sorry!" that willfully ignores the real costs of this policy. It's politically better to save 1 person directly than 100 indirectly. You can't execute this policy without the looming urgency of an emergency, so you declare one despite that your SMEs are unwilling to do so. That's "strong leadership"!


Nothing better than prolonging the life expectancy of someone in their last few years or months of their natural lives with little bodily functions intact; while deferring vital surgery for teenagers and destroying the mental health of the entire planet (ask any psychologist).


The emergency is that the fatality rate in children is 15%.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478203/


The fatality rate depends on the strain. And of course, the demographic of people with the disease. Currently in Western countries almost all cases are in young, healthy men.


Thornhill et al, NEJM, MPOX summary:

-98% gay/bisexual

-41% have concurrent HIV

-95% transmission by sexual activity

-13% hospitalized for derm/anogenital lesions

-No deaths

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2207323


Can't it leave disfiguring scars?


Is that alone cause for declaring something a public health emergency? I’ve only seen videos of men who have contracted and recovered from it and no one mentioned disfiguring scars so far and couldn’t tell that was an issue myself based on their appearance.


A contagious disease that makes a lot of people sick, has a considerable death rate, and often causes scars is definitely cause for declaring a public health emergency. Under what possible definition of the term would you think otherwise?


Maybe that's not a good sample? Both by size, and selection, insofar as if you've recently got disfiguring scars perhaps you'd be less likely to make and share a video of yourself. Also, how long does it take to know if marks from pox sores are going to be permanent scars anyway? Or how much they might fade? This is all so recent that even if you did still have marks on your face afterwards, could you really know whether they'll be "disfiguring" in the future?


[flagged]


> We wish you would get yourself monkeypox out of the gym and give it to your wife or your child gets monkeypox out of school

I can barely believe that you would post something as awful and as shameful as this, not once but twice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216037).

Obviously we have to ban accounts that post like this. I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you pull something like this again on HN, we will have to.

Please review the rules and stick to them regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Maybe it's developed a new tendency to mutate like covid and could turn into something worse. Sounds like it's time to make vaccines available.


Wasn't the concern when covid started losing lethality all about mutations?


Covid hasn't lost lethality. Delta was much more serious than the original strain, Omicron is about as serious, but more contageous.

It has lost lethality in our population, thanks to a high vaccination rate, and a better understanding of how to care for people with it.

And, of course, nobody knows how lethal the dominant strain of COVID that will be circulating in 2023 is going to be.


Lasting scaring?


> So what’s the “emergency” in that context?

You've named it: "tens of thousands of cases outside of Africa". It entered the white world (disclaimer: I'm white myself).

On top of that we've just lived through (hopefully) the worst if the COVID pandemic, so WHO is additionally spooked.


My critique is that this could create a “boy who cried wolf” scenario.

And apparently this decision was actually an overrule by the director - a panel actually voted against it.


I agree with this risk. What wave of Covid are we ever-vigilant against currently?


This isn’t the first time monkeypox has been seen in the ‘white world’ though

> Monkeypox is a disease of global public health importance as it not only affects countries in west and central Africa, but the rest of the world. In 2003, the first monkeypox outbreak outside of Africa was in the United States of America and was linked to contact with infected pet prairie dogs. These pets had been housed with Gambian pouched rats and dormice that had been imported into the country from Ghana. This outbreak led to over 70 cases of monkeypox in the U.S. Monkeypox has also been reported in travelers from Nigeria to Israel in September 2018, to the United Kingdom in September 2018, December 2019, May 2021 and May 2022, to Singapore in May 2019, and to the United States of America in July and November 2021. In May 2022, multiple cases of monkeypox were identified in several non-endemic countries.

[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/monkeypox


So now it's more of a "we're more scared now because of the pandemic we've just had".

This is as good a reason as any.


Because this is affecting the western world, it gets a huge attention. I'll keep dreaming of a world where headlines are about the 1.5 million confirmed deaths caused by diarrhea globally. Instead of a disease with 0 deaths in Europe out of 10k+ cases. But of course no one wants lesions because they don't look pretty on the gram.


>> I'll keep dreaming of a world where headlines are about the 1.5 million confirmed deaths caused by diarrhea globally

But that's not news. That's well known. Also, generalising 'news' makes no sense. Of course news sources from certain countries will focus on news that effects their readers. Deaths from diarrhea are of little relevance to the readers of any 'western' news source.


> You've named it: "tens of thousands of cases outside of Africa". It entered the white world (disclaimer: I'm white myself).

You’re probably being downvoted for this though it’s completely true.


"It's affecting us now and we're talking more about it, that's just racist!" I don't know why everything these days has to call to arms over how woke we all are.


> In an unusual move, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the declaration even though a committee of experts he had convened to study the issue was unable to reach a consensus. The same committee met just one month ago and declined to declare a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC.

What's the W.H.O. process which allows the director-general to bypass the W.H.O. process for scientific debate by experts?

The W.H.O. has (so far) failed to achieve international consensus on an international treaty that would give the W.H.O. the legal authority to override local health authorities (national, state, city) in the declaration of public health emergencies. If such a treaty were in effect, today's declaration by one human would have immediately affected the daily lives of 8 billion humans.

https://inb.who.int/


Yup. And yet people who sound the alarm about the problems of international government are described as the crazy ones! One guy unilaterally upending people's lives for no obvious reason is exactly what that would look like, all the time. Arguably it already does given what happened with COVID.


There hasn't been enough media coverage of the IHR/W.H.O. treaty negotiations, https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am...

> As of yet, there has been almost no public awareness or debate of the substantial amendments to the IHR although the WHO Secretariat circulated the US initiative first in January 2022 to state parties ... Attention to the US amendments was further drowned by the stir made around the launch of the negotiations to draft a new treaty on pandemic preparedness and response by 2024 with a hitherto uncertain scope, content and outcome, as well as an uncertain relationship to the existing legal framework of the IHR.

Without objective reporting and analysis on the nuts and bolts of these ongoing treaty negotiations, which affect every person and country on Earth, we're left with coverage by polarized blogs, https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/stop-the-who


with covid it was a lot of people who conspired to upend lives


According to study published in New England Journal of medicine, 95% of studied cases were sexually transmitted almost exclusively in men who have sex with men.

41% of those infected with monkeypox were coinfected with HIV.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/monk...

For anyone worried that monkeypox will be equivalent to Covid, the evidence does not support that.


No, it probably won't spread nearly as well outside the gay community, and never become anything resembling Covid (or smallpox fortunately...).

But it's spread so extensively in the gay community, that it's also going to infect people outside that community now. And it's likely going to stay with the gay community as yet another STD for many years going forward.

There is also a high risk that now, when it's solidly established itself in humans, it may mutate to become much more human-to-human transmissible. (like Covid did)


> And it's likely going to stay with the gay community as yet another STD for many years going forward.

But in this case, we already have a vaccine for it. In the US at least, once we start opening up smallpox vaccine reserves, if you're in the gay community and you have a lot of partners, seems like a no-brainer to get the vaccine and be done with the risk of tissue-scarring pox.


Seems like a no-brainer for most people to get the covid vaccine too, and yet something like 1 in 5 haven’t done it, and maybe up to half aren’t fully vaccinated.

There’s also the question of availability and it currently isn’t clear how available the monkeypox vaccinations are.


Compared to COVID, monkeypox is much harder to spread (as you can see in the statistics - it's mainly in one very specific group, gay men in specific cities within specific subcommunities where members have a lot of sexual partners), and in some sense, more eyebrow raising results. It's likely that Monkeypox is actually less deadly than COVID, but the possibility of lesions growing on your genitals, anus, mouth that with a quite high possibility leads to permanent tissue scaring is quite frightening.

The fact that it's mainly in populations of gay men in San Francisco and New York also help - I would wager that cross section of the population is heavily left leaning, and heavily vaccine supportive.

The monkeypox vaccine is just the smallpox vaccine. The US has a stockpile of it and it is still given to military members.


There is also a high risk that now, when it's solidly established itself in humans

This has already been the case for a long time, maybe forever? It's endemic in parts of Africa, just never managed to gain much of a foothold outside that area. But even without that movement, the petri dish for such mutations has been open for business for quite a while.


> According to study published in New England Journal of medicine, 95% of studied cases were sexually transmitted almost exclusively in men who have sex with men.

I've heard from various outlets that people who are not MSM were, as of a couple weeks ago, in some places being denied tests even with distinct symptoms because they didn't meet the criteria for test allocation.

Case statistics can be affected by bias in how you identify cases.


It's definitely not just caused by a lack of testing. The UKHSA is reporting a huge difference in positivity rates between men and women: "More adult men were screened for orthopox virus (3,467, 80% of all tests) compared to adult woman (447, 10% of all tests) and children (173, 4%). Monkeypox positivity rate was considerably higher in adult men, 54%, compared to 2.2% in adult women and 0.6% in children." See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monkeypox-outbrea...


Well, yes, maybe. The gay community also happens to be rather well-organized when it comes to STD threats. Together with the more benign course this strain seems to take, the varied presentation, and issues of shame, it is not unreasonable to believe that self-selection and other issues may affect the statistics right now.

And, either way, the statistics would have looked exactly like that in the early years of the HIV epidemic, which obviously became a huge burden on society as a whole, both in terms of infections and death as well as curtailing sexual freedom.


This isn't really true. The continued persistence of new HIV cases, syphilis and gonorrhea isn't really an indicator of being "well organized." There's basically no reason anyone post-1995 should have gotten HIV, and yet 34k+ people a year, mostly young men, continue to get it.


Well... the US at least has also spent the last few decades decreasing funding to community sexual health centers, which were at the forefront of the AIDS response. So, that's not great.

Hopefully this is a reason to reallocate money to a critical part of public health.

If anyone is curious, there's a 2019 survey of "the challenges experienced by state and local public health entities at the frontline of STD prevention and control" (NCSD Phase II report): https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NCSD-Phase...


Does anyone have a data source that includes recoveries? There’s been a lot of fearmongering over the past month based on charts of cumulative cases.


According to the CDC:

> Infections with the type of monkeypox virus identified in this outbreak—the West African type—are rarely fatal. Over 99% of people who get this form of the disease are likely to survive.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/faq.html


>Over 99% of people who get this form of the disease are likely to survive.

So it has an IFR two orders of magnitude higher than COVID-19 in young people.


> "...There’s just nobody acting like this is a fucking emergency" - Peter Staley

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/22/peter-stale...

So, I think it's crazy that:

> In early June, top officials assured Staley that the US had in place a stockpile of 1.2m doses of the vaccine

> The problem was most of those doses weren’t ready. Just 68,000 of the doses were already located in the US; the rest were in freezers in Denmark awaiting shipment. Worse, two-thirds of the doses in Denmark had been manufactured on a new factory line that the FDA hadn’t inspected – which meant the vaccines produced on it couldn’t be used, despite approvals from the FDA’s EU counterpart, the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

So the US is buying a stockpile of vaccines that it considers unacceptable for use? Who does that help? Was this the result of lobbying from a US-based donor with heavy investments in specific EU producers? Is this emergency-preparedness theater?

The FDA reported that it _started_ inspections of that plant on July 7. To be clear, these were bought under a Trump-administration order, so they could easily have inspected that plant a long time ago. Why wait until you actually have an outbreak?

And of the vaccines that _were_ already FDA-approved, it really seems like the administration has really slow-walked moving them.

Meanwhile, in my city which has perhaps the worst outbreak in the US in per-capita terms, vaccines are scarce enough that people can wait for hours in line and then not receive it. People who are in the group who are advised to get the vaccine can call one of several phone numbers to try to get an appointment, but no one will answer.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-monkeyp... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/21/san-franciscos...

So while others in this thread are arguing that the WHO shouldn't be declaring this an emergency, I'm frustrated that the people calling it an emergency aren't empowered to do much.


Public regulatory agencies are chronically underfunded and have been for a long time.

The FAA gets Boeing to hire people who carry out the jobs of regulatory approval, just think about that.


If you don't have the resources to inspect overseas facilities, maybe try trusting the agencies in those countries? And if you're not willing to do that, and you're sure you're not going to have the resources to inspect the facility, then don't buy vaccines that you're not going to allow yourself to use. And if you _are_ going to have to send people to inspect an overseas facility, why not do it sooner rather than later?

But buying vaccines that are supposed to be used in an _emergency_ (i.e. against bioterror https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/before-pandemi...) and storing them overseas and not allowing them to be used in a crisis because you haven't inspected the facility that produced them seems like the worst of all worlds. This government spent resources on vaccines, pretended this made us safer, and refused to use them.

I have a bag of supplies for an inevitable earthquake. Using the logic of our government, instead of storing it in my home, I should keep it in a distant self-storage locker ... and I should refuse to drink my emergency water because the bottle could have BPA.

> “We were hit by a wall of FDA arrogance, which it’s famous for: ‘This is how we do things, and this is why we do things, and you all don’t know how it works.’ They told us directly that they simply think that they are the best in the world at this and that the EMA is not quite there yet. And they won’t say why.”

I think when you fail hard, you shouldn't get to be smug at the other countries that (a) produced the vaccine and (b) had their inspectors do their jobs in a timely manner.


Anyone know if I can get monkeypox from going to the gym?


My layman's understanding is that it's pretty unlikely unless you are getting frisky with someone. It's spread by "intimate contact" which is a lower bar than sexual contact - extended contact with an infected persons clothes or bedsheets will do. This is also why condoms don't stop the spread of monkeypox.

Not the worst idea to wipe down machines before/after use as a general rule, monkeypox or not.


My layperson's understanding is also that if this were happening, we should have noticed it by now. The communities where monkeypox are blowing up all have gyms with a lot of gay customers, and if it was easy to spread we would have noticed more straight or celibate gym-goers in those areas getting infected. That said, the limited testing infrastructure and the questions screening people before they even get tested might stop us from confirming such cases?

I _am_ annoyed that the guidance on how it spreads keeps getting broadened. Initially it was supposed to be fluids or skin-to-skin contact ("ok, easy, no cuddling with active rashes for now").

Now the guidance says it can be carried on cloth (e.g. linens). But really, the virus doesn't know that much about what surface it's on, right? And indeed the CDC public-facing guidance does say that it can spread from "shared surfaces, and objects, such as bedding, towels, and sex toys, that were used by a person with monkeypox", but only under a collapsible heading "Can I get monkeypox from having sex?" I.e. they recognize that surfaces can carry it, but perhaps there needs to be a lot of contact with the surface in question. But if, for example, I'm unaware I'm infected but I lie on a pool-side lounge chair which someone else then uses ... couldn't that be comparable shared contact as a bedsheet? Is that so far off from contact with a bench at the gym?

Slightly more concerning is:

> "It also can be spread by respiratory secretions during prolonged, face-to-face contact"

The same page includes "talking closely" as a form of "intimate contact". So it does sound like it can be spread by airborne particles but perhaps less easily than the other viruses we've all been dealing with. If there are a few treadmills in small, not especially well ventilated room, at what point do two people running there share respiratory particles which are comparable to prolonged face-to-face contact?

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/faq.html


> But really, the virus doesn't know that much about what surface it's on, right?

actually, it might. Porous vs impermeable surfaces can affect how long a viral particle remains infectious.

Could also be potential electrostatic effects, copper for example.

Not that many people have stainless steel bedsheets...


I'm not claiming that all surfaces are exactly equal in their ability of transmitting it. But the guidance of "such as bedding, towels, ..." under a heading specifically about sex makes it seem like an artificially narrow category. How about upholstered furniture? Did the last guest lie shirtless on the sofa in your airbnb or hotel room? People are acting like this is only an issue of gay men having sex, and while clearly that's a very large factor, as the outbreak grows I'm guessing the chance of other forms of community transmission are going to rise.


We've historically treated the bedsheets of the ill as being an infection vector, before germ theory.

It is odd they tie bedsheets to sex contact alone. Eg if you sometimes co-sleep, that itself is a vector. Though good chances are you are also having sex with your sleeping partner.

There is a time element as well. If someone with the disease laid out on your sofa yesterday and it's dried out since, you're fine. It also probably requires sustained (and probably wet - eg sweat) contact.


Honestly with that many different ways it notes that almost feels like those "rare but serious side effects" I see at the end of drug commercials.

It feels like they don't have a for sure good idea so they are covering all their bases just to be safe.


If someone with Monkeypox visits your gym, and you touch the same surfaces they touch, yes, it is possible.

Source: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

Even after they recover, they are still very infectious: https://twitter.com/alexmeshkin/status/1543313032817917953

And yes, someone with Monkeypox went to a gym after feeling sick (https://twitter.com/KxngRudy/status/1545893342994644994).


I hope the vaccination efforts are targeting gay men?


> In an unusual move, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the declaration even though a committee of experts he had convened to study the issue was unable to reach a consensus. The same committee met just one month ago and declined to declare a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC.


The outward presentation of this virus is most interesting. We just went through a pandemic that was silent, invisible and on the whole similar symptoms to other illnesses - it’s funny to think Monkeypox will be a pandemic of vanity as well as monkeypox.


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The way I read the parent post, they are implying that SARS-CoV-2 would have been taken more seriously if it left disfiguring scars on the faces of 10%[1] of those who contracted it, rather than "just" killing 0.1%[2] or so.

1,2: numbers entirely made up from my head, not from sources!


Exactly, thanks for staying level headed beyond the knee jerk reaction. I’m more speaking to the metaphorical prod needed to move the public.


“Of” or “with”? Cause that makes a pretty big difference.


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This line of thinking has never made sense to me. We spend billions worldwide combatting diseases that mostly impact people over the median age of death and with other co-morbidities. Heart disease mostly kills old and obese people, but no one ever has a problem with tax dollars going to this. If we don't care about people with co-morbidities, doesn't it make sense to shut down heart institutes and cancer wards?


I believe coronavirus spending was well into the trillions over a short period of time. Not to mention the disruption of the lives of people not at risk. The response was disproportionate to the risk, and I don’t think questioning that response means one doesn’t “care about people with comorbidities.”


Any time people's thinking around Covid doesn't make sense to you, try to remember how often we were (and are) knowingly and intentionally lied to by trusted authorities. For example, "masks don't work", or, "GOF researchers are so confident this didn't leak from a lab that you're an anti-science (!) Trump fanatic if you suggest it".

Also, the idea that the elderly must be saved at all costs surely comes as surprising news to anyone paying attention to how healthcare works, or how nursing homes are managed. Many countries Corona death states consist of 30-50% purely nursing home deaths from extreme mismanagement, and decades of under-funding for nursing homes.

If you care about the elderly, then be outraged at those responsible for that major fuckup, not the people trying to get a sense of perspective amid oceans of deliberate misinformation and unjustified censorship.


We don't put everyone into lockdown to treat heart disease.


The amount of censorship and suppression of valid dialogue on HN is shameful.


Many are unaware of the extent of ineptitude and corruption that has infiltrated our institutions. Many people would rather assume they are still capable. It's comforting to think we can still rely on them. Ignorance is the ultimate happiness.


I don’t understand how HN has become this cesspool of nonsense. It is a news. The virus is spreading. What this has to do with US or China? WTF with you guys.


HN became just another community where it's trendy to talk in a smug way about everything, like it's this elite community of smarter people and everyone acts like one. The only problem is that people know nothing and still act this way, like they are major experts in the field spreading the truth.

It's easier to notice when they talk about non-tech related things, because with tech you are prone to give the benefit of the doubt that they might now what they are talking about, since if it's not your field of expertise it's harder to doublecheck the claims. With news instead everything is crystal clear. Just the usual average internet user that believes he understood everything and acts as a major expert when in reality it completely misses the complexity of the issues he's talking about.


I find this to be true of smart people in general. They have strong opinions about things they know little about, maybe because they're used to being right more often than not.


This comment of yours is an amazingly good example, even an exemplar, of itself!

Well done! (I mean that. It probably sounds snarky but I swear I'm just impressed with how well the self-referentiality held up over most of the whole thing.)

Anyhow, I once got to talk to Alan Kay on here. There's a lot of noise, sure, but the signal here, when you get it, is outstanding.


It's actually not a good example of the described behavior at all. The commenter was clearly opining about how some people act on HN, not feigning expertise in some field.


I want to ask about - sometimes people presume a statement on a forum like this is an authoritative statement, when it's just an opinion.

Why don't we always just consider posts on forums to be just some opinion, from the poster's point of view, isn't that how a conversation works? Though I know expectations differ, I'm not sure why.


Let me own up to it: to some extent I was just teasing the OP.


aw, I want to discuss the question in general, not specifically. Another time.


There's so little content to the references to WHO's COVID handling that I can't tell whether they mean WHO over-reacted or under-reacted to COVID.


Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO. They don't really control much in a practical sense. In terms of global response to the pandemic, I think we both under-reacted (at the start) and over-reacted (towards the "end"). China could have stopped the virus if they had locked down back in November/December of 2019, instead of updating their WeChat filters. Whereas by mid-2021, we were past the point of controlling the virus, but NPIs continued in force for a while longer before people realized they were mostly pointless.


China didn't know they had a virus at all in November 2019. The 16th of December is the first documented hospitalization in Wuhan. A wastewater sample in Italy collected on 18th of December was later found to be positive. 23rd/24th of Dec was the first sample collection in Wuhan which was sent to be analyzed for a novel pathogen. 27th-30th of December is when the alarm bells started really going off in China. The first official messages and international alerts went out on Dec 30th and on Dec 31st Reuters published it's first report.

So the virus had been in Italy at least 2 days after the first hospitalization in Wuhan, and around 5 days before doctors collected the first samples which were sent off to labs which later determined it was a novel virus.

You actually can't blame China for not acting before they really had any patients or knew anything was going on.


Chinese government records put the first case as Nov 17, with a daily trickle of cases after that:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...


That's useless since he didn't cause any suspicion in medical authorities, he was just a 55 year old patient, presumably with pneumonia. He was of no public health significance until the retrospective analysis was done in January.


> Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO.

Some conspiracy folks consider the WHO, just like the UN, the manifestation of the NWO global government that secretly controls everything.

Didn't help that Trump had some weird hate boner for the WHO to such a degree that the US left it, plus a lot of "WHO is in the pocket of China to suppress the truth!" hysteria around t he same time.

Then there was this whole episode of, mostly US conservative media, creating a shit-storm over this WHO tweet [0] by interpreting that tweet as "WHO said it doesn't transmit between humans, WHO has been wrong and shouldn't be trusted!"

[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152


I think you’re muddying the waters. Outside of US partisan stuff, corruption at the WHO is _legendary_ and has been for decades.


Those positions are surprising to me, for two reasons:

① Finger-pointing an institution that has very limited funding, and very limited power, for corruption, is like blaming the river for sea level rise. Sure, if you dig into the numbers, it contributes to the result; but fundamentally it is not the cause of the problem, and there are much bigger fishes that deserve much more scrutiny.

② Blaming WHO for a tweet where they simply report the words of the Chinese investigation with attribution, at a time where many countries with actual power pretended there was no risk, feels disingenuous.


Forget about conspiracy though, the WHO should have a relatively clear and narrow mandate, while the UN is known to be a toothless assortment of petty bureaucrats involved in everything with no clear consensus. The only thing they share is the goal of their members to grow their personal fiefdoms.


Hum... Looks like it was already a worldwide pandemic at December 2019, and in several countries already by November. So no, China trying that wouldn't have much of an impact.

I don't know if it would be possible to detect the virus earlier if it happened on some place that wasn't trying to cover it up, but when we got to know about it, it was already too late to contain.


People talking about COVID, vaccines, China and Bill Gates in one paragraph make me lose faith in humanity.


People dismissing valid criticism, are just as bad as people making up conspiracy theories that are being criticized in the above comment.

There is no way you cannot talk about the Gates foundation when talking about the AZ covid vaccine[1]. It was supposed to be open access and the Gates foundation lobbied to sell it to AZ which has a horrible track record[2].

I personally think that had they not lobbied that hard to privatize the Oxford vaccine, the problems with the AZ vaccine, would probably have been fixed with further iterations by third parties and the discussion would have looked a bit differently. But we will never know. It's worth noting that the medical branch of the Gates foundation is run by ex pharma bros.

At end of the day Gates is just another greedy grifter, hiding his greed behind altruism. That puts him squarely in line with most Billionaires that have their own little foundations that help them steer and lobby shit instead of paying tax.

[1] https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/astrazeneca-looks-...


Bit tangential and perhaps meta but, did you lose faith in humanity reading your own comment? You did mention all those things in single paragraph. Just kidding.


I agree that that's going way too far. But I also sympathize with people and see the side of people who feel like they've lost some trust in all this after the last few years. There's a spectrum of reactions.


Why would talking about corruption cause you to lose faith in humanity rather than the corruption itself?


I think it's a hacker tradition to distrust authority and question everything.

And now this attitude of mistrusting anything and everything coming from an "official" source has gone mainstream.


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Why?


At the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were starting to get concerned about this strange new disease in China, the WHO announced there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" and no need to restrict international travel to Wuhan. In reality, there was nothing but evidence of human-to-human transmission and plenty of Chinese doctors knew this, but the WHO repeated the Chinese government's lies.

Instead of trying to contain the pandemic in it's earliest stages, the WHO told the world there was nothing to worry about. They screwed up about as bad as they possibly could, and helped enable the spread of a disease.


> when people were starting to get concerned about this strange new disease in China, the WHO announced there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission"

That is an US conservative disinformation meme, this [0] was the actual WHO tweet;

"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."

That statement only refers to those particular preliminary investigations, yielding no clear evidence. It's very specific and scientific language, that many news pundits just chose to read and interpret in the most generalized way possible to get their sensationalist outrage headline of "WHO says there is no evidence for H2H!".

There is a similar disinformation meme out about the WHO and CDC allegedly saying "masks don't help and people shouldn't wear them!", when the actual WHO and CDC statements were about prioritizing masks, as in respirators, for health care workers at the front, instead of the general public buying up all the supplies of them in panic.

A bit part of that was very unclear messaging by a whole lot of authorities and governments, where to this day nobody makes much of a distinction between "mask", as in any kind of face covering, and "mask" as in actual medical respirator like a FFP2/N95.

[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152


I'm not a conservative, nor am I parroting some meme, so almost nothing you say applies to me. My comment is based off reading the travel advisory the WHO put out claiming "no significant human-to-human transmission, and no infections among health care workers".

"WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travellers"

The WHO put it's faith in the Chinese government, how did that work out? If China was open and honest, we could have started taking COVID-19 seriously a month earlier. Instead they tried to assure everyone it was nothing to worry about and the WHO went right along with it.


The US had more than enough time to control covid by when China confirmed human-to-human spread.


The WHO made a huge mistake, it was already spreading internationally, and yet somehow you found a way to shift blame to the US...


Human to human spread was confirmed before any international case was found.

I traveled from China to US in January 2020 well after China had reported the virus as transmissible and the US was not doing jack shit to screen.


> Human to human spread was confirmed before any international case was found.

Technically true, but very misleading. It was discovered that it was already in Italy before China acknowledged human-to-human transmission.

Also, nothing in my first comment has anything to do with the US. I don't know why you keep shifting attention to the US, unless you think the US is responsible for the international spread?


So China is the bad guy when the Italians had person to person spread in Italy and didn't even notice let alone let anybody know there was person to person spread.

China actually managed to catch the disease.


There was literally nothing the US could've done that would've lead to Covid being comtrolled. Their efforts to stop it spreading there from China seem to have more or less worked, and were at least effective enough that they weren't the problem - the US had contact tracing that suggested it wasn't really spreading, and genetic testing also indicated this wasn't the source of the major US outbreaks. What turned this into a global pandemic was undetected, large-scale community spread in Europe, in places like Italy - all the subsequent major outbreaks seem to have come from there except maybe for South Korea's. Those coutries listened to the WHO and followed their advice.

This just got obscured because the American media is a bunch of partisan trash with unfortunate global influence that saw the pandemic as a good way to replace a leader they dislike. So everything got distorted and spun based on that angle, and it did immense damage to people's understanding of the pandemic. American potlics seems to have a bit of a main protagonist problem at the best of times too.


The exclusion of Taiwan and the behaviour of their representatives during interviews whenever the subject came up.


The WHO is an agency of the UN, of which Taiwan is not an independent member.


That shouldn’t matter. It’s the World Health Organisation. Not the UN Membership Health Organisation.

The only reason Taiwan is not a member is because of China being a bully.


Straight lines on log-log plots.


China owns them. Doesn't mean everything they say is bullshit, but they can't be really trusted anymore.


I guess the WHO must be "owned" by a lot of countries [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/o...


As opposed to every other organization owned by the U.S. oh please.


I believe this is what the kids are calling the 'Bothsidesism' Fallacy. Or is this meant to only be said in domestic political contexts?


Is there a fallacy for throwing that fallacy around all the time?


Sure we can call it the 'curiousgal Fallacy'.

Let me explain my downvote here.

You are not wrong, and as an american it is infuriating to see what our country has become.

But that makes his original point no less valid.

China silenced the WHO and the WHO literally pretended their internet went out when asked about Taiwan.

Both sides having done something fucked up doesn't negate what's going on in this situation, thus the 'both sides-ism'

If it did all arguments would be over instantly, as only babies are innocent.

There are degrees of fucked up and context matters.


Nothing to worry about then, I guess?

On a more serious note: "The WHO" is already a sign of a limited understanding of how this works. In as far as an organization of that name exists, it's a tiny bureaucracy tasked with coordinating other organizations to carry out tasks set by the other thing called "WHO", which is just the label for a group of delegates from those national organizations.

The WHO does not have any institutional power of itself. It does not have any interests or credibility that is distinct from the interests and credibility of "getting the world's national health agencies" in a room.


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I am curious too what % of those who contract the virus, seemingly easier than it used to be caught, have been vaccinated with the mRNA shots (how many shots, and how recently their last shots were).


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it's not the mods "censoring" you, it's the community filtering your comment out


HN is definitely turning into an echo-chamber where certain opinions and questions are down-voted and whisked out of sight quickly.


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People ascribe malice to drug development when simple economics explains things easily.

Incredibly high initial capital cost (development, safety, and testing + calendar time for same) + low probability for success (efficacy and no safety issues) = high minimum floor to drug development costs

When faced with that reality, how are you going to choose between alternative capital investments if you're running a pharma company?

Of course you're going to preferentially develop drugs that (a) will have continued, high volume demand throughout the patent period & (b) address a disease unlikely to be cured.


> where the vaccines were originally claimed to prevent infection and transmission by government agencies and pharmaceutical corporations

Who claimed this? In America, for the mRNA vaccines, preventing hospitalisation was the only endpoint even tested across the board in the pre-release studies.



The relevant quote:

“So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.

Repeat: "extremely unlikely — not impossible"



I thought the vaccine prevented infection.

The CDC website says “All COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the United States are effective at preventing COVID-19.” https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/facts.htm...

Is there a claim that the vaccines don’t prevent infection?


Just an aside to go along with sibling comments: Pfizer's press release back in 2020 [0], the one where the "95% efficacy" statement came from, was also careful to distinguish SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. It used both terms correctly and made no claims about preventing infection. We knew this for ~2 months after that press release [1][2][3].

It was the politicians/media who conflate SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 that assumed this also meant preventing infection, and the general public had little reason to distrust them at the time. Even among people who have kept up with this, these couple of months seem to have been pretty strongly memory-holed.

[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

[1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

[3] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...


COVID-19, medically speaking, is the disease. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and infection.

Similar to AIDS (the disease) and HIV (the virus that causes AIDS).

For many viruses, you can have an infection without developing the disease. Especially if your immune system is primed, say by prior exposure and/or vaccination.

And while technically you're still transmissible while you have an active infection (because you have virus multiplying in you), your viral loads are also likely much lower than someone exhibiting symptoms (because your immune system is keeping things under control).

But for highly infectious diseases, sometimes even low doses are sufficient to infect someone around you.


> Is there a claim that the vaccines don’t prevent infection?

Careful there with conflating the virus, SARS-CoV-2, with the disease, COVID-19, these two are not synonymous.

At no point does the CDC article even mention SARS-CoV-2, it only mentions "the virus", never actually naming it, yet it keeps mentioning the disease it causes by name.

Basically a bit like trying to talk about AIDS, without even mentioning HIV besides as "the virus".

That's also why the article doesn't really say anything about vaccine effects on virus infections, it's all about vaccines effects on the disease that comes post-infection.


Plenty of evidence of people who are vaccinated still getting the virus.


> Who claimed this?

Plenty of governments were pushing vaccination campaigns with tales of "herd immunity".


> According to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s center for disease control, the new, highly contagious virus variants mean that herd immunity can only be reached if 80 percent of the population is vaccinated.

The Race for Herd Immunity [0]

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-vacci...


The vaccine trials didn't measure hospitalization or serious illness. They didn't even show impact against mortality. Go read the trial reports! The only endpoint they cared about was PCR positivity, and they claimed it led to >90% reduction in infection.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

"Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis"

It's totally insane how in recent months some people have started trying to rewrite the history of the vaccines here. This is like the fourth time or so I've seen that claim on HN in about as many days. Do you people really think this will work? The events in question took place last year, not a century ago. Rewriting the historical record isn't going to be that easy.


> vaccine trials didn't measure hospitalization

You’re partially right. Symptomatic illness was measured [1]. (Not PCR positivity.) Hospitalisation wasn’t.

That said, neither was transmission. Broader point holds.

> Do you people really think this will work?

Your comment is strong without dipping into bizarre conspiracy theory.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389


I'm not alleging a conspiracy, only that this behaviour of claiming the vaccines were never meant to reduce infection is now occurring frequently, even though surely every one remembers that this isn't how it was presented at the time, at all.


> even though surely every one remembers that this isn't how it was presented at the time

That the vaccine wasn’t sterilising was disappointing. But I remember clearly, in February 2021, getting it because I didn’t want to get sick. To the degree people felt misled, at least in America, that’s on the back of the news diet they choose to consume.


News diet? You talk as if worldwide mandates and forced vaccination, all justified by the supposedly sterilising immunity, never happened at all. It's still happening though!


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If you’re going to chat shit about an important global organisation it’s worth explaining your comments. Given they were handling a once in a century pandemic I feel like they did a decent job.


WHO has some huge fails.

They didn’t declare it a pandemic until March 11 - extremely late.

They were extremely critical of travel restrictions, while the countries they did the best in the first year defied that advice and had the most extreme restrictions, like New Zealand.

They failed to actually investigate the Wuhan Lab that may have been the source.

They didn’t acknowledge airborne spread for two years - allowing people to live in fear of packages.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

What did they do right?


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Nailed it. Of course I got downvotes. However I know what I saw and others did too.


Why? Cause they told the western states correctly to get their shit together, got ignored for month and then people tried to blame it on a single statement which was redacted two days later to make it seem like the WHO told them to do nothing?


Come on. The WHO comically mishandled Covid. It took them months to declare a health emergency despite because they didn’t want to upset China. They wrongly advised against travel bans or curtailing travel. It took them almost two years to admit Covid could travel through the air.

And during all this the WHO bent over backward to praise and defend China. The same country that covered this up and who’s actions ultimately led to a global outbreak.

The WHO was so China centric that Bruce Aylward was outright ignoring questions if they contained the word “Taiwan.” It become so comical that the Japanese deputy PM said they should change the name to “Chinese Health Organization.”

China lied about the nature of the pandemic, lied about the severity, gave fake statistics and information, and the WHO never questioned or looked further into any of it.

The WHO is a joke. They have been dragged through the mud during Covid because they deserved to be dragged through the mud. We might not be in this situation if the WHO were a competent organization willing to rise to the challenge of an actual health emergency.


> gave fake statistics and information

This is comically false. When the virus spread in the rest of the world we got to see that it wasn't the Black Plague 2.0 and the CCP didn't (and couldn't) possibly hide millions of deaths in Wuhan.

The stance and respect that China has managed to acquire is only logical given the very united front they present. That isn't without cost for the individual as the harsh lockdowns clearly show. Would you trade places with a Chinese in order to have the same treatment for your country in a press conference happening 5000mi away from you?

No? Me neither. It's settled then, China can have #1 as far as I am concerned. England used to be #1 for the longest time and now it's #6. It's not like people are running around like chickens with their heads severed off. As always it's all about purchasing power parity and your very immediate surroundings which make a person satisfied with their life.


> The WHO comically mishandled Covid. It took them months to declare a health emergency despite because they didn’t want to upset China.

The WHO declared COVID-19 a PHEIC on 30 January 2020 [0], about a month after it arouse original attention in international media by very late 2019 [1] [2] [3]

> The WHO was so China centric that Bruce Aylward was outright ignoring questions if they contained the word “Taiwan.”

The very same would have happened if any WHO official was asked something in relation to Palestine [4]. Which, just like Taiwan, is not a sovereign nation recognizes by the UN because certain other UN members are actively denying these territories that recognition.

That's why WHO, and UN officials in general will act like certain places don't even exist; Their mere mention of these territories, like sovereign states, can be interpreted as the UN, giving them, at least unofficial, recognition.

> China lied about the nature of the pandemic, lied about the severity, gave fake statistics and information, and the WHO never questioned or looked further into any of it.

I'd be really interested what your alleged timeline for events looks like. By late 2019 China was publicly admitting investigating a SARS like outbreak. When do you locate the actual outbreak start? Months earlier?

That's the only way the WHO could have taken "months" to declare it a PHEIC, yet any public awareness about any of this only existed by late 2019.

[0] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/covid-19-public-heal...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/00c78d1974410d96fe031f67edbd86ec

[3] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-china-probes-pneumoni...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_t...


Organisations sometimes make mistakes when responding to something novel. They don't necessarily screw up again, unless there's something deeply wrong with what they're doing. Is there something deeply wrong with the WHO?


> Is there something deeply wrong with the WHO?

Yes - it is antithetical to national sovereignty. Simple as.


It’s allowed to get something wrong if you recognize the error and change course. But we’re 2-3 years into their errors and all they’ve done is double down.


What was novel about COVID-19? There is a worldwide epidemic pretty much every decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology


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What “BS” are you referring to? This is just a news.


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Well lots of things can be spread by sexual contact. Most respiratory viruses, for example, are quite easily spread through the implied close proximity. The CDC does have a page titled "Monkeypox Facts for People Who are Sexually Active"[1] but I don't know how many cases are spread that way versus other ways of coming into contact with sores or things that touched sores.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/sexualhealth/index.ht...


It has been a widely studied disease before the current European outbreak. So we can safely say it's not an STD.


I'm no epidemiologist, but I think "as much an STD as herpes" would mean that it's popularly stereotyped as an STD despite most infections not having anything to do with sexual activity (HSV-1, which is mainly transmitted via oral contact, is much more prevalent than HSV-2, which is mainly transmitted via genital contact [1]).

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simp...


Seems like it's even more of an STD than herpes then.




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