Eric Feigl-Ding, one of the most hilariously over-the-top, and ubiquitously online, Covid alarmists — the personification of “I’m still wearing my mask” progressive Twitter — was given a guest column in the Washington Post to argue that monkeypox is now a Covid-esque pandemic. What’s more, he argues, “unless we declare an emergency and act quickly to combat it, we risk repeating the same mistakes we made with our covid-19 battle.” It’s more or less a copy/paste of Feigl-Ding’s line on Covid: “By not preemptively raising the alarm, the WHO is putting countless lives at stake — just as the delay in classifying covid-19 played a critical role in the failure to control that virus’s global explosion effectively,” he writes. “We must enlist the full spectrum of prevention and diagnostics to curb the spread, preclude the development of local disease reservoirs in rodents, and prevent suffering and possible death.” The column concludes morosely:
We should all refuse to walk blindly, allowing the present to become prologue to greater catastrophe. Global health officials must advocate for and enact a unified, coherent approach to fighting the monkeypox pandemic before it reaches the proportions of covid-19. If we act, guided by the lessons of the past two years, we can avoid the mistakes that cost the world millions of lives.
Setting aside the obvious grift of Feigl-Ding’s shtick — as one science reporter put it, he has “an egregious history of fear mongering and inaccurate statements” — let’s take his argument seriously for a second: Given that monkeypox, while not technically a sexually transmitted disease, is primarily transmitted via sexual activity, what exactly would a Covid-style emergency-mitigation response look like? In a tweet thread about his article, Feigl-Ding suggests — you guessed it! — masks. But of course, if monkeypox really is the brewing global public-health catastrophe that he insists it is, masks are far from enough. His logic doesn’t make sense, unless this is something like what he has in mind.
The other difficulty here, particularly for professional tweeters like Feigl-Ding — whose audience is uniformly left-wing — is that it’s not just any kind of sex that we’re talking about needing to crack down on here. As the Washington Post column notes, “the available European data show that most infections have occurred in men who have sex with men (MSM).”
I’m looking forward to hearing Feigl-Ding take his argument to its logical conclusion.