CDC sounds alarm about new, deadly monkeypox strain

Written by Kevin Haggerty on December 19, 2023. Posted in Current News

An uptick in a deadlier strain of monkeypox gave cause for a health advisory from the CDC after the director declared, “Virus season is here!”

With a global outbreak of monkeypox in 2022, so too came the urges for those beholden to political correctness to avoid stigmatizing the virus for its prevalence among homosexual men.

Now, a new outbreak has spread to the urban areas of the Congo, and its 10 percent lethality still had the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) carefully crafting their warning.

Thursday, they released a Health Alert Network (HAN) Health Advisory about the “occurrence, geographic spread, and sexually associated human-to-human transmission of Clade I Monkeypox virus (MPXV) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).”

Speaking with Reuters, the World Health Organization’s monkeypox surveillance team lead Rosamund Lewis expressed, “The virus variant is known to be more virulent. If it adapts better to human to human transmission, that presents a risk.”

The advisory from the CDC detailed that, unlike the 2022 cases of the Clade II variant that had impacted more than 31,000 Americans resulting in at least 55 deaths, the current outbreak was a deadlier Clade I variant said to have spread to 22 of the 26 provinces of the Congo.

Thus far in 2023, there had been 581 deaths reported from monkeypox in the DRC.

“In two provinces, outbreaks of Clade I MPXV associated with sexual contact, including MSM (men who have sex with men), have been reported for the first time in DRC,” detailed the CDC. “Mpox vaccination is not generally available in DRC.”

Lewis noted of the spread, “We have very little information of who is dying of mpox [in DRC] other than age,” but Reuters indicated that, “The WHO is also worried about an outbreak among sex workers in South Kivu, because of the vulnerability of the population as well as the risk of the infection spreading to neighbouring countries, she said.”

Meanwhile, as cases of Clade I had not been reported in the United States, the CDC pivoted to promoting smallpox-related vaccines like Jynneos, which had first received approval by the Food and Drug Administration in Sept. 2019.

“Vaccines…and other medical countermeasures…are available and expected to be effective (emphasis added) for both Clade I and Clade II MPXV infections,” the CDC stated. “However, vaccination coverage in the United States remains low, with only one in four people who are eligible to receive the vaccine having received both doses of JYNNEOS. CDC recommends that clinicians encourage vaccination for patients who are eligible.”

Likewise, as this season’s brand of COVID rolled in with the nickname “Pirola,” the CDC’s new director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, readily picked up the baton of her disgraced predecessor, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, with some gaslighting on “the steps we do every year” that included masking as a practice like it wasn’t both a new behavior in the United States from 2020 and routinely proven ineffective and potentially detrimental.

“COVID is starting to increase again after being stable for the past few weeks. We’re also seeing increases in pneumonia cases which can increase this time of year,” said Cohen. “To protect yourself and your family this holiday season, take the steps that we do every year to protect ourselves. Get your updated COVID and flu vaccines and your RSV vaccine if you’re over 60. It’s not too late to get vaccinated if you haven’t already. And use additional layers of protection like avoiding people who are sick, washing your hands, improving ventilation, and wearing a mask.”

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Header image: Gulf News

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