After Covid, monkeypox: the same circus again?

All the frameworks that we saw during the Covid crisis seem to be in the process of being reinstalled at record speed: the fear-mongering, the propaganda, the vaccine-centric response

Guest post by Laurent Mucchielli, research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Since the end of the Olympic Games, politicians and the media have been speaking more and more of a coming monkeypox epidemic. All the frameworks that we saw during the Covid crisis seem to be in the process of being reinstalled at record speed. The story begins by sewing fear in the population, and ends with a conclusion that has been prepared in advance: we are going to have to buy billions of doses of vaccines (patented of course) as a matter of urgency. It is urgent and crucial that as many of us as possible first awaken intellectually and then find the courage to publicly announce their refusal to consent.

We all remember what we lived through between 2020 and 2022. A virus said to be comparable to the terrifying epidemics of the past was going to ravage all of humankind; there was no possible means of treating people; the only viable approach was to shut people up in their homes (repeated lockdowns) while waiting for deliverance to arrive through the miracle of “95% safe and effective” vaccines.

It seems likely that most people today understand that the reality was a great deal more complicated than that, that politicians overplayed — or rather, manipulated — this whole affair; and that, meanwhile, the vast majority of the media betrayed their mission to provide trustworthy information to the population, becoming instead messengers to transmit and amplify massive political and industrial propaganda. Most of us thought that many years would have to elapse before the game was played again, enough time for “people to forget”. Now it seems this was a mistake: some among them are clearly desperate to play the match all over again, especially where the prizes on offer are so immense. And they are using exactly the same methods, born of the good old techniques of commercial marketing. After the Covid affair, the monkeypox business is on the march.

Declaration of emergency and the announcement of the vaccine solution in 48 hours: a chronology

On the afternoon of August 14, the Director-General of the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern because of the spread of monkeypox. This followed the figures on the growth of this disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the cases found in neighbouring countries (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda). Getting into his stride, he also announced a “regional plan of action, which requires initial financing of 15 million dollars”.

Just 48 hours later, in France, state-financed France Inter radio interviewed Brigitte Autra, president of the Committee for Monitoring and Anticipating Sanitary Risks, a government committee which in August 2022 succeeded the Covid-19 Scientific Committee directed by Jean-François Delfraissy. Mrs. Autran is a well-known vaccine researcher with direct links to the pharmaceutical industry, as the independent magazine Basta Mag reported in 2015.

So that Thursday August 17, France Inter invited her on its morning show to explain to the French that the situation was extremely serious (“The French health system has been placed in a ‘state of maximum vigilance’”, the Prime Minister had just declared). She then made clear that the circus was already ready: “We are equipped to face up to this epidemic with vaccines which will work”. She went on to say that the MVA vaccine, manufactured by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, “protects from serious cases”, and “certainly has the ability to reduce contagiousness”. This vaccine has existed for a number of years, but Mrs. Autran claimed that there were “very strong arguments” for thinking that “it is going to protect us just as effectively against this [new] variant” recently emerging in Central Africa — a claim that seems to owe as much to astrology as to virology when we consider that this is a virus that is constantly mutating. The (inevitable) conclusion was not long in coming: “It’s very important to increase the vaccination capacity”, even if, “for the moment (my emphasis)” there was no need to “begin a general vaccination campaign in France”.

In that same broadcast, two familiar figures from the Covid media circus were also interviewed, Karine Lescombe and Xavier Lescure, just to emphasise the consequences of what Autran had said. To the question “What populations are at risk?”, Lescure answered “Young children, the immunocompromised, and pregnant women”. From here it’s easy to deduce that these are the people who will be offered priority vaccination, especially since these are the brave “experts” who also decided during Covid to knock down one of the final clinical and ethical barriers which endured in this field: that pregnant women should not be exposed to novel vaccines (just as doctors avoid prescribing all kinds of medicine to them, in fact).

Autran finished her interview by saying that, even if it were ever necessary to consider a general vaccination campaign (everyone having now understood that, in fact, people are already fantasising about this), there’s no need to panic: “Our industries are on the cusp of increasing their production”. As it happens, on the same day the Danish company announced a drastic increase in its production, as well as the deposit of a request at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to approve their product for adolescents (12-17 years old). And then, shocking news: the company’s share price soared on the stock market.

The media-political phase is (provisionally) brought to an end by Gabriel Attal (our prime minister alleged to be “resigning”), on Tuesday August 20, with this announcement on X (formerly known as Twitter):

Our health system is on high alert. We are ready to face all scenarios and all risks. […] 232 vaccination sites are now open across our country, and many more will soon be ready. At my request, the Ministry of Health has contacted the Higher Health Authority (HAS) to update its vaccination recommendations by the end of August.

All that’s left for the (reputedly “independent”) French Higher Health Authority to do is to comply nicely (as it did throughout the Covid crisis) and that’ll be that. Then the politicians and all of their servants (beginning with the TV doctors and the journalists who obsequiously interview them) will once again be able to claim to speak “in the tame of science” whilst blocking all critical debate. Who is going to dare to put up their hand and say that they find all this a little simplistic, or even highly contentious, when they know already that they will be labelled a disgusting “anti-vax/conspiracy theorist/extreme right-winger”, and ostracised in every way imaginable?

Because that’s where we are intellectually in France, trapped in the oh-so-Manichean and reassuring opposition between pro-vax and anti-vax. The good guys against the bad guys. The thinking of little children.

A Strategy of Fear

This story of the return of monkeypox, which is being installed in the public sphere, presents a familiar structure. It was sketched out back in 2009-2010 during the swine flu outbreak, considered and refined on numerous occasions over the following two decades, and finally implemented on a global scale in 2020-2022 (as discussed in my book, La Doxa du Covid). The related business plan has two major elements, drawn from the most classic portfolio of commercial strategy: 1) create demand, and 2) present the industrial product as the unique and indispensable means of responding to the demand in question.

To create demand in healthcare, first of all it’s important to create fear. This is the basis of everything else. This fear is distilled on a permanent basis across the media, with the bludgeoning information being so incessant that many of us no longer even notice. This began as a drip-feed even before the summer only to accelerate massively as soon as the Olympic Games came to an end. As a sort of anthology, here are some French media headlines from the past two weeks:

• “A hyper-deadly variant of monkeypox is crossing borders, with the WHO on maximum alert” (Yahoo News, August 9)

• “This ‘highly contagious’ illness is spreading across France, as a call for vaccination is launched” (Les Echos, August 10)

• “New monkeypox epidemic: “We know what a pandemic looks like, and we don’t want one’” (L’Express, August 11)

• “Monkeypox: WHO warns of the risks of imported cases in Europe, as the first case is diagnosed in Sweden” (France Bleu, August 14)

• “Monkeypox: the spectre of a new epidemic looms over the world” (20 Minutes, August 16)

• “Monkeypox : why the new variant especially affects children” (Le Figaro, August 16)

• “Monkeypox : Gabriel Attal places the health system on ‘maximum alert’” (Ouest France, August 16)

• “Anxiety mounts over the spread of the monkeypox virus” (Le Monde, August 17)

• “Monkeypox: isolation, tracing, vaccines… how France is trying to protect itself” (Le Parisien, August 17)

• “Monkeypox: the French health system on red alert” (La Tribune, August 17)

• “Monkeypox: France anticipates the blow” (Libération, August 18)

• “Monkeypox: Europe must prepare itself as cases soar, according to the European health authorities” (Le Journal du Dimanche, August 18)

• “Monkeypox: The Pasteur Institute is ready to ‘test and vaccinate’” (La Tribune, August 19)

• “Monkeypox: cases, lockdowns, treatments…. How France is preparing Itself” (L’Internaute, August 20)

• “Monkeypox: Gabriel Attal announces the opening of 232 vaccination hubs against monkeypox in France” (L’Indépendant, August 20)

• “Monkeypox: a new Covid-19? France prepares its response to the monkeypox epidemic” (La Dépêche, August 21)

The announcement of the imminent arrival of a pandemic disaster (or other fundamentally anxiety-provoking health issues) is therefore the starting point. Fear is then reinforced by the lack of certainty as to how the virus is spread. Apart from through blood contact, monkeypox is essentially transmitted through contact with skin lesions or with the mucus of infected people (mouth, genitals and anus). It’s clear that those people at risk are above all those who have unprotected sex with strangers, and thereby also those of their close friends and family with whom they enter into daily contacts. There is no asymptomatic carrying of the disease.

As a result, “for as long as there are no symptoms, there is no risk of transmission” (as the Assurance Maladie website reminds us). This makes it clear that the risk of a monkeypox epidemic is far lower than that of SARS-CoV-2, which was doubly invisible as a respiratory virus which generated asymptomatic carriers. Nonetheless, the friends of the pharmaceutical industry are already out in action to try on the contrary to generate panic. On social media, the self-styled “no fake med” influencers tell us nevertheless that the epidemic can be transmitted by air (see for instance here and here). The very media-savvy infectious disease expert Karine Lacombe also talked about it on France Inter. Fear not, good people, and run to the chemist’s and buy whole bags of masks...

After this beginning, the other strategy to generate fear consists in exaggerating the seriousness of the illness. During these last days the press has been reporting that the WHO estimates the mortality rate of the new monkeypox virus to be “on average 3.6%”. However this figure is based on the figures from Congo alone. However, if we take a step back, on August "2 the WHO website published “key figures” showing that 99,176 cases have been registered worldwide since January 2022, with a total of 208 deaths — a mortality rate of 0.2%. The latest variant (considered to be more dangerous) has been identified in 934 cases, causing 4 deaths (giving a mortality rate of 0.4%). As for the monkeypox variant which has been circulating in Europe for the past two years, Assurance Maladie reports 4,967 cases in France between May and December 2022, and 0 deaths. So even if the new monkeypox variant is more virulent than its predecessor, is this a good reason to strike fear into people? No. But all we are missing is a simple little mathematical model à la Neil Ferguson (idiot’s guide to epidemiology) predicting millions of deaths ahead, and the Covid scenario will be ready to roll out for a repeat.

By way of comparison, since the start of 2023, the WHO has registered more than 6.5 million cases of dengue fever and over 7,300 deaths. Hardly anyone talks about it. Could this possibly be because the last experience of general vaccination against dengue, which took place in the Philippines in 2016-17, turned into a complete fiasco –— with the vaccine seeming not only not to protect people but on the contrary to make infections worse, among people who had never been bothered with the illness before? In the same way, we might ask why no one ever discusses tuberculosis, even though it is the highest cause of death through infectious disease worldwide (over 1.3 million deaths last year alone). Could it be perhaps because this is treated not with patented vaccines but with antibiotics which cost almost nothing? Or is it instead because this disease is a matter for far-off poor countries — places which most people know next to nothing about, and about which they couldn’t care less?

A society for the future?

Is this the society we want for ourselves and our children? History is speeding up. The business plan and marketing of these good intentions are well embedded.

The WHO, once spotless, has for years been trying to lay down the law over global health policies, strengthened by its new financial basis in “public-private partnerships”, of which the main operator is the famous philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates. Gates operates directly through his Foundation, which is investing massively in GMO crops for food and in vaccines for health, and also indirectly through financing a whole suite of organisations which also contribute to the WHO’s budget, the most important being GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), recently renamed The Vaccine Alliance).

These groups have elaborated a new doctrine, “One Health”, the heart of which is as simple as the sweetest thought of a child: vaccinate the whole world to eradicate all illnesses. In institutional language, this provides “an integrated and unifying approach that aims to balance and sustainably optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems” (WHO declaration, 2023). This is curiously similar to the project of Gates himself, clearly outlined on his blog in April 2022:

The world needs to be ready to produce enough vaccines for everyone on the planet within six months of discovering a new pathogen. […] [Soon] it will be possible to achieve something amazing beyond preventing pandemics: eradicating entire families of pathogens. The world could rid itself of all coronaviruses, for example, or even all influenza viruses. A future without pandemics — and without the flu — is worth investing in.

Father Christmas is not far off, probably fuming that his spotlight has been stolen.

To conclude: it’s crucial that as large a number as possible of people wake up intellectually, and find the courage to say loudly and clearly at least two things.

First, that we do not want a world governed by the childish whims of a few multi-billionaires, and by the cynical marketing of pharmaceutical companies which have brought about countless scandals and millions of victims which we must not forget (Thalidomide, Distilbène, Prozac, Vioxx, Dépakine, Mediator, OxyContin, and so on) — even while these industries try their hardest to accustom us to think that all our usual medicines (using generic treatments which don’t make profits any more) are only fit to be thrown into the dustbin to clear the space for the new great vaccine business.

Secondly, we don’t want a world in which unscrupulous politicians, surrounded by a cabal of “scientists”, “journalists” and other influencers, spend their time terrorising their people. Without a struggle, this appears to lead inexorably to this elite coercing people to accept — under the pretext of a “health emergency” — the loss of their rights and fundamental liberties which have only been won with enormous struggles since the end of the 18th century.

Just as happened with the lockdowns during the Covid crisis.

This article first appeared in French in QG. English translation by Toby Green.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)