I’m sure somehow this will get blamed on China as well. On the Oranges of Monkeypox here we come.
As it turns out, the NIH studies things and grants money for research. The place must be rotten to the core full of liberals trying to learn shit. Can you imagine anything more in unAmerican than understanding something on first principles instead of simply going with your gut?
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They should rename it “Critical Race Theory.” Then maybe we’ll deploy some resources to fight it.
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I’ve been doing my own research.
Turns out there is considerably more researchers “investigating earthquakes” in countries that have large earthquakes later…
shrug I dunno, seems like a reasonable thing to do.
In other news, I apparently have not been vaccinated for the pox, mom mixed up me with my uncle.
I hope you trolled her appropriately for that.
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2k cases! 
9 days after 1k cases.
We’re now over 3,300 global cases. It’s going to be pretty close to another 9 day doubling and we’re definitely running into testing capacity issues. NYC can only conduct 20 tests per day, and they’re about to have 1M visitors for a Pride event.
I still think it’s somewhat likely that COVID damaged/weakened T cells and stuff that was just under an R0 of 1 may now be just over it.
Another 9 day doubling, right on target.
And that’s with horrendous testing. I’m not saying we’re going to see millions of cases and have a COVID-like pandemic, but monkeypox is a thing and it’s not just going to magically burn out.
Pretty clear the R0 is > 1 and I still think it’s because COVID hurt our immune systems, not because of a monkeypox mutation.
Very speculative at best
I mean this is the largest global outbreak of monkeypox outside Africa by a factor of like 35 right? I think the odds the R0 is > 1 are probably like 95-99% at this point.
There are studies showing t-cell damage from COVID, and we’ve seen some unusual outbreaks at the same time, it adds up. Speculative, perhaps. But extremely plausible.
No idea what extremely plausible actually means, but it’s not likely whatsoever that’s the cause. This kind of stuff continually happens, although it may be something other than monkeypox like lyme or zika or whatever. It’s not nearly as new or as different as you think.
Root cause is far more likely further encroachment of humans into areas with animals than anything else.
Pretty sure doctors would be noticing abnormal things by now if we were all had a weakened immune systems.
Like a hepatitis outbreak, a monkeypox outbreak, flu going around in the summer like crazy, worse than usual cold and flu seasons? That all seems somewhat abnormal.
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IIRC, the hepatitis seems to be due to the COVID itself and not some other pathogen. The unusual timing of peak cold and flu seasons is explained by the fact that many COVID measures shifted the timeline on these things (i.e. people didn’t get them when they normally do which had downstream effects).
So all you’ve really got is monkeypox. COVID damaging the immune system in such a way that it has increased the susceptibility to monkeypox and nothing else.
Possible? Sure, anything is possible. Plausible seems a bit much for me.
Nah, I think it’s more susceptible to ~everything, monkeypox is just the first thing with an R0 previously just below 1 to take advantage.
Edit: That’s my opinion/prediction/prognostication. Not a fact and I’m not a doctor/scientist.
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Approximately everything?
If that were true then we would expect to see otherwise unexplained upticks in all sorts of infectious diseases (I assume that’s what you’re talking about, but if it’s something else, let me know). Have we? COVID has been around for more than 2.5 yrs, so that’s more than enough time for such things to have been observed and reported. I’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened.
Seems unlikely.
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