True but that was all in one region. Even being generous with regions on this one you’ve got:
USA/Canada
UK
Spain/Portugal/France/Germany/Belgium/Netherlands/Italy
Sweden
Australia
Israel
So I guess the question is, could there be some kind of live animal being moved between all those countries in this timespan? Seems unlikely.
The world is besieged by teleporting monkeys and all Joe Biden wants to do is send hard-working Americans’ money to Ukraine and baby formula to Mexico. Thanks, liberals.
Maybe do a Google image search before declaring it no big deal.
This seems notable, given the timing. Like, there’s a monkeypox outbreak in a random year, what are the odds it’s bioterror? Very very low. There’s a monkeypox outbreak 3 months after Russia invaded Ukraine and threatened the west and it’s not going well, and we know they were working on weaponizing it, what are the odds it’s bioterror? I’m at least removing one “very” in front of the low.
this is an awful source fwiw
The news outlet or the Russian defector?
news outlet
Zilch. We’ve had sporadic monkeypox outbreaks for years. We know it’s endemic in rodents in Nigeria. There’s nothing to suggest this wasn’t a 100% standard spillover event.
Fair enough, I wasn’t sure, but the source they cited seems legit and here’s another report from a more reputable outlet (UPI was founded by Scripps).
There’s no evidence to suggest it’s not a standard spillover event, however, contextually we know from the testimony of that former Soviet guy that the USSR thought process was to have plausible deniability by using a virus that was circulating anyway - this is why they moved away from researching smallpox. We can safely conclude that Russia likely has weaponized monkeypox at its disposal.
Whether or not it’s likely they’d use it is debatable, and I’d typically lean heavily towards no, but they obviously have motive right now. The western world is causing the Putin regime and Russian civilians a lot of economic and quality of life suffering right now.
I don’t think we can put it at zilch. It seems significantly more likely than the lab leak theory on COVID.
It’s a basic Occam’s Razor problem, you’re creating a very elaborate bioterror plot to explain something that’s more simply explained as a standard monkeypox outbreak that we know will happen now and then.
Right but I’m not saying “It’s definitely bioterror” or even “It’s likely bioterror.” I think I put it at 5% yesterday, and in light of this maybe 10% is more reasonable.
Those probabilities are ridiculously high.
The wide geographic distribution coupled with the low case counts (around 100) suggests there’s a large outbreak that’s the source of all of these (ie Nigeria).
Things got really, really bad in Wuhan before an appreciable number of cases were exported. Even for a city like NYC or Paris, only a tiny fraction of the population travels internationally in a given period of time.
The 2 cases in Australia are in different capital cities, they both arrived from the UK/Europe in the last week. One of them had mild symptoms before he left the UK, it doesn’t look like there has been any local transmission here yet.
Right, but that suggests human-to-human transmission and an R0 > 1.
I mean, on top of that, the way this thing is spreading all over the world is super concerning. Think about how long it took COVID to get all around the world, and I’ve got to think there is more travel in and out of Italy from the rest of the western world than in and out of Nigeria from the west. I just googled it and it looks like ~1M tourists per year in Nigeria and around 94M in Italy.
Unless there was some sort of event in Nigeria I’m not aware of, it’s hard to imagine all of these cases were contracted in Nigeria and spread this quickly to this many places.
So this would all but confirm human-to-human transmission, it definitely makes it very likely.
We’ve basically never seen this kind of spread with monkeypox, the likelihood is that it’s become more transmissible either through a mutation or through increased human susceptibility for some reason. Or some combination thereof.
I find it odd that they keep referencing the transmission among the gay community. My understanding of monkeypox is that there’s nothing about it that makes it more or less transmissible based on that. There’s a possibility this outbreak originally hit the gay community and moved through it by happenstance, or that because the gay community is more likely to stay on top of their health/hygiene in this regard they’re identifying the cases first, but the likelihood that a straight person is less likely to show up with a case tomorrow than a gay person doesn’t seem very high.