What really happens with monkeypox?

Written by David Bell via the Brownstone Institute,

The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about as many people this year as die from tuberculosis every four hours has come to dominate international headlines. And it is causing a lot of fear in some quarters against the WHO.

Fear is justified, but it is usually misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they were simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared a state of emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But The problem addressed here is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and it is important to understand this if we are to solve the problem.

Mpox, formerly known as Monkeypox, is caused by a virus that is thought to primarily infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It is quite common to pass within and between people. In people, the effects range from very mild illness, with fever and muscle aches, to severe illness with the characteristic rash and sometimes death. Different variants, called clades, cause slightly different symptoms. Transmission occurs through close physical contact, including sexual activity. The WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was primarily transmitted by men who had sex with men.

Current outbreaks involve sexual transmission, but also other close contact, such as within households, increasing the potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe consequences, possibly due to problems with lower previous immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other diseases.

The reality in DRC

The current PHEIC has been primarily driven by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), although outbreaks have also been reported in neighbouring countries spanning a number of clades. This year, about 500 people have died from Mpox in the DRC, more than 80% of them under 15 years. During the same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The deaths from malaria were mainly due to a lack of access to very basic goods such as diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs and insecticide nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded worldwide. Malaria is almost always preventable or treatable if resources are available.

In the same period that 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands of people in DRC and surrounding African countries died from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the effects of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills approximately 1.3 million people worldwide each year, a rate approximately 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.

The population of the DRC is also facing increasing instability, marked by mass rape and massacres, partly due to a struggle between warlords to satisfy the hunger of richer countries for the battery components, which in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the population of the DRC and nearby populations, who should of course be the primary decision makers in relation to the Mpox outbreak, are currently living.

An industry produces what it is paid for

For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the axis of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, in proportion to the diseases that shorten overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that perpetuate them. The media would have barely mentioned the disease, basing their reporting primarily on impact and trying to provide an independent analysis.

Now the public health sector is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the last 20 years building agencies like CEPI, which was established at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and focused solely on developing vaccines for pandemics and expanding the capacity to detect and distinguish between more and more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently adopted amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

While improving nutrition, sanitation and living conditions has been the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries is seen as dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restrictions on local decision-making and resource-squeezing as the main interventions.

So now we have thousands of public health officials, from the WHO to research institutes, non-governmental organizations, commercial companies and private foundations, whose primary focus is to find targets for the pharmaceutical industry, grab government money and then develop and sell the drug. The entire newly created pandemic agenda, successfully demonstrated by the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detecting outbreaks, exaggerating their likely impact, and instituting a commodity-based and typically vaccine-based response.

The sponsors of this whole process – countries with large pharmaceutical industries, pharmaceutical investors, and pharmaceutical companies themselves – have acquired power through media and political sponsorship to ensure that the approach works. Evidence of the model’s intent and the harm it causes can be effectively hidden from the public by a compliant media and publishing industry. But in the DRC, people who have long suffered under the exploitation of war and the extraction of minerals that replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime must now also deal with the wealth extraction of the pharmaceutical industry.

Dealing with the cause

While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupt public health are global. Bird flu is likely to follow the same path as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will too. While the risk of pandemics is not significantly different than it was decades ago, there is an industry that depends on making you think differently.

As the Covid-19 playbook has shown, this is about money and power on a scale matched only by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current attempts in Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, criminalize dissent, and introduce health passports to control movement are not new and in no way unrelated to the inevitability of the WHO declaring Mpox PHEIC. We do not live in the world we knew twenty years ago.

Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases it fuels, will continue to ravage the people of the DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is very likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from much larger threats. That is why decision-making must now be centralized, far from the affected communities. Local priorities will never match those on which the expansion of the pandemic industry depends.

In the West, we need to stop blaming the WHO and focus on the reality unfolding around us. Journalists promote censorship, courts serve political agendas, and the concept of the nation state, on which democracy rests, is demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate groups like the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions created after World War II specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and refuse to participate, we have only ourselves to blame. We vote for these governments and accept clear fraud, and we can choose not to.

Sadly, for the people of the DRC, children will continue to die from smallpox, malaria and all the other diseases that make money for foreign companies producing medicines and batteries. They can ignore the pleas of the servants of the white men of Davos who want to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were purchased long ago and are now at the service of others.

The only real hope is to ignore lies and empty statements and refuse to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and society, censorship protects falsehoods and diktats reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequality it promotes. Until then, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotechnology advisor in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), program director for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.