As if the World Health Organization (WHO) wasn’t already a big enough joke, they have declared Monkey Pox a “global health emergency” despite only 14,000 cases existing on the planet of its 8 billion residents.
“We have an outbreak that has spread rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The idea that Monkey Pox is a global health emergency appears to be nothing more than yet another power grab by leaders around the world. Nothing makes it easier to secure emergency powers than the prospect of a deadly plague.
“For all of these reasons, I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern,” Ghebreyesus said.
A Global Health Emergency of international concern is defined by WHO as “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”.
Really, there is nothing extraordinary about monkeypox. The disease exists in many countries but so does virtually every other common disease. The pox has infected 14,000/8,000,000,000 people.
Plenty of other diseases are far more deadly, and far more transmissible but are not regarded as “global health emergencies” Influenza for example kills tens of thousands yearly (12,000-52,000 in the U.S. alone according to the CDC) and infects 9,000,000-41,000,000 and hospitalizes roughly 140,000-710,000 people.
These numbers reflect the United States alone. Why is it that Influenza is 642 times more infectious than Monkey Pox if we consider only the low estimate at 9,000,000 cases per year, but influenza isn’t flagged as a crisis by WHO?