Satirical memes featuring jokes about monkeypox have been widely circulated on the Internet. After the first cases of monkeypox were detected in Europe, various speculations and myths about the cause of the virus spread rapidly on social media. Many of them are copied verbatim from conspiracy theories that arose during the coronavirus pandemic.
TikTok users are relentlessly discussing alleged new restrictions on movement. One account is telling followers to prepare for new lockdowns and the “tyranny of monkeypox.” Other posts simulate British government press conferences during the UK lockdown, using the same slogans the country’s government used during the pandemic.
Some messages mock government statements about Covid-19. While concerns about an outbreak of monkeypox are understandable, scientists say this virus is not similar to Covid-19, and most experts agree that monkeypox will not escalate to the scale of a full-blown pandemic. Unlike the coronavirus, the new pathogen is much harder to transmit, and doctors already have vaccines and treatments to fight it. In addition, it is contagious only after symptoms appear, making it easier to detect and isolate. As a result, restrictive measures such as mass isolation or mandatory vaccination campaigns will not be necessary in reality, according to Professor Peter Horby, director of the Pandemic Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Instead, quarantine measures should be much more effectively targeted at those who are infected and those who have had direct close contact with them. Dr. Rosamund Lewis, speaking on behalf of the World Health Organization, said there is no need for mass vaccination against monkeypox. WHO experts have also reassured that there is no reason to impose travel or flight restrictions at this time.
Accounts on social networks and news agencies in Ukraine, Russia, China, and the U.S. began posting messages claiming that the outbreak was the result of a leak of the monkeypox virus from a laboratory or its use as a biological weapon. However, it is relatively easy to determine the most likely origin of the virus by decoding its DNA. Geneticist Fatima Tokhmafshan likens the process to scanning a bar code on a package, which makes it easy to trace where and how it reached the recipient. All available genetic material with samples of the causative agent of the new disease shows that the virus is a direct (and very close) descendant of the strain of monkeypox that is widespread in West Africa – in other words, it is not of artificial origin.
Is it a coincidence that outbreaks of monkeypox in Europe and the United States occurred shortly after monkeys escaped from a laboratory in the United States for four months? In 2018 and 2021, several cases of the disease were already recorded in the United Kingdom, and in 2021 there was an even larger outbreak in the United States. In all cases, the virus entered the country through travelers or imported animals. “Therefore, it is very likely that exactly the same thing happened this time,” says Professor Horbi. “And this is undoubtedly the most likely scenario.” The first case detected in the United Kingdom during the current outbreak was in a patient who had recently arrived from Nigeria. As for the version that the monkeypox virus escaped from the laboratory, Professor Horby said, “There is absolutely no basis for this statement. On the Internet you can find statements that the current outbreak of monkeypox was allegedly planned in advance. By whom? In answering this question, many point to Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci (or even directly to them), which is also in line with COVID conspiracy theories. This unfounded statement is being spread in Russian media, on the Chinese social application Weibo, and on Instagram. It can also be found on Facebook – in Romanian, German, English, Arabic, French, Slovenian, Hungarian and Punjabi. The posts mention a document prepared by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) – an organization dedicated to studying biological security issues. In fact, in 2021, NTI conducted a seminar to help global leaders combat future pandemics. Participants were asked to work on a fictional scenario: “A deadly global pandemic associated with an unusual strain of monkeypox virus… [that] has spread worldwide.” According to NTI, the risks associated with monkeypox have been “well documented for many years,” and the number of cases of the disease is increasing, making the choice of this virus for the seminar an obvious one. Outbreaks of various types of infection happen all the time, so the organization itself, which predicts and plans such outbreaks, is unlikely to arouse suspicion.
“Bill Gates… said that this will happen in May… From the very beginning, we have said that this is all about biological weapons…” Statements about the link between smallpox and anticoVID vaccines fall into two groups. Some point out that the AstraZeneca vaccine (as well as the Russian “Sputnik”) uses a chimpanzee virus that has been modified so that it cannot reproduce and spread in the human body.
“Who is surprised that after introducing a genetically modified chimpanzee virus to millions of people, there is now an outbreak of monkeypox?” The figure above shows an example of such a connection. However, monkeypox is caused by a completely different type of virus than the one in AstraZeneca’s vaccine. It also occurs primarily in rodents, not monkeys. Others claim that the Covid-19 vaccine somehow suppresses the immune system, making the body more susceptible to other infections. This statement also has no real basis. It is well known (and repeatedly confirmed by relevant research) that all vaccines stimulate rather than weaken the immune system, teaching the body to fight certain infections more effectively. Although in extremely rare cases a vaccine can indeed cause an autoimmune reaction in which the vaccinated person’s body starts destroying its own healthy cells (this explains the rare cases of thrombosis after vaccination), there is no evidence that vaccines suppress the immune system or reduce the body’s ability to fight other diseases.
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