[flagged]
We will probably see many reminders that it is not just a gay illness as well, which is right, correct and important but at the same time is likely to make gay sex seem less dangerous.
On the bright side, I’d say that gay men in major cities who are probably most at risk of contracting monkeypox are increasingly savvy and willing to seek out a vaccine or treatment in situations like this. I know few people in my friend group who aren’t on PreP to prevent HIV, and equally few who didn’t rush to get a monkeypox vaccine as soon as the information on where to get one became available.
One difference between the two is that you “were killing grandma” by not wearing a mask around her or exposing yourself to the virus when you might later be around her. With MP, you have to have serious physical skin to skin contact with grandma. If promiscuous sexual behavior is the driving spread, you’d have to be getting promiscuous around grandma, or know you’ll be experiencing deep physical contact with her skin and yours. All pretty unlikely.
Also people were blaming people for not wearing masks even if they were never around a grandma. Just because they might get it and infect someone who might then be around someone's grandma. Being a link in the causal chain was enough to be condemned by some people.
It is much harder to avoid covid since you generally have to breath air and be around people in day to day life and it was always dangerously contagious. Skin-to-skin contact is not part of day to day life for most people (masseuses?).
The current contractors of the virus are like 98% gay men, and that group of people is - unsurprising - not very open to being told "your lifestyle is bad". That said, they're very good at finding disease in the community and making safe decisions [1]. Just like AIDS, it'll inevitably be the "normal" population that becomes the main spreading group, since that group is way less responsible overall at managing risk. Tying or attempting to blame promiscuity as the issue won't solve the problem, won't stop the spread, and it'll hurt a group of people already under constant attack.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/provincetown-covid-delta-outbrea...
We all hope it won't mutate, but if it does we may look back and wish we'd been more proactive at the beginning.
Proactivity is vaccinating the high-risk, and getting the word out there on transmission vectors - and this is happening. Proactivity is setting the "global health emergency" status by the WHO so governments can be aware to start ramping up vaccine productions and teaching doctors/nurses/etc to start screening for it. Proactivity is getting samples into labs so it can be tracked, and setting up tests so we can more easily identify cases.
Proactivity is NOT shaming gay people for having sex. People were shamed for not wearing a mask with COVID when COVID was killing thousands and we didn't have vaccines and we didn't have tests and we couldn't keep hospitals functioning and old people were actively dying in alarming numbers. COVID took 14 days before symptoms started, so you couldn't adjust your risk and activities according to your health status. Today, we don't shame people for not still wearing a mask - because we have vaccines that work even better and are widely distributed. Likewise, we shouldn't shame people for engaging in sex, but instead encourage them to get vaccinated.
If we had enough vaccines, they alone would be a great solution. But we don't, so we need to consider other ways to slow/stop the spread.
> it won't be stopped by telling gay people to stop having sex or shaming them for it.
For a lot of people, sexual orientation has nothing to do with how they view this. Their view would be the same if monkeypox were spreading among all young adults. Projecting anti-gay sentiment onto these people is not productive. It is also not accurate. They simply believe that it's not too much to give up promiscuous sexual behavior for 8 weeks or so. They would ask the same of straight people if it were spreading in that community.
The rhetoric is “why can’t those horn dogs stop fucking [for a while]” (quote from a HN comment) NOT “why are 1M doses of the vaccine the US developed in 2001 sitting in crates in Europe and why have only 36K of them brought to the US”. SF alone has been begging the feds for 35K doses. Gay men are taking time out of their life and jobs and whatever to go stand outside hospitals hoping to get one of the few vaccine doses. People are ready and willing and a government that says “it’s just sex they can wait” is not a government that thinks “if we move fast we can stop the spread”.
Broadly, telling people abstinence as a solution is always wrong. It’s a bad policy in the face of birth control, it’s a bad policy in the face of STIs and it’s a bad policy for monkey pox. yes abstinence will prevent pregnancies but it’s not a successful way to approach solutions because it has never worked. Hell, with covid telling people to just stay home didn’t work. People protested not being able to get haircuts.
Where is this comment? I searched the thread and the rest of HN and didn't find it.
> It is a gay issue and their is an anti-gay sentiment.
You seem to think that you get to decide what motivates other people to think things. I would think that doing so would lead to misunderstandings and conflict.
For example, people who would support temporary abstinence policies regardless of the affected groups would bristle at being told their beliefs are anti-gay (unless they are, I supposed). They might tend be your ally on many other policies and causes, but feel alienated by your accusations. This is one reason why ascribing sentiment to other people's statements might not be a great idea.
"Then ya you might just have yabba, but if so that is way way down on your list of potential problems."
For some reason I feel like if you're doing the nasty with your grandma that quote probably applies to you.
Only when it became predictable and appeared flu-like, posing no major threat to many demographics, did it become supremely virtuous to wear masks and distance.
But mask wearing became popular well before we knew COVID was “flu-like”.
People forget this 180 back and forth whiplash.
It depends on what kind of mask you are wearing.
Disposable cloth face masks work very well for a virus with a droplet based spread like the flu.
>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...
Disposable cloth face masks do not stop the spread of airborne viruses like Covid, which continued to spread like wildfire globally while Flu cases were at a global all time low.
With an airborne virus you need a mask capable of filtering the virus out of the air you breathe, not one that only catches the tiny droplets you spray out when you cough or sneeze.
Judging from the when there was attention on AIDS and particularly the dialog around not following the guidance regarding safe sex on that, yes.
> Even though it is not considered a sexually transmitted infection, monkeypox can spread during intimate physical contact between people. This contact can happen when you have sex[..]
I think it's important to not let monkeypox be viewed as another "gay disease", both so people don't use that as an excuse to let their guard down, and also so that homophobia doesn't lead to violence, but we should also recognize that promiscuous sexual activity is a big risk factor.
Certain diseases are more like an STD than not. Saying it is not an STD is like saying HIV is not an STD.
People will argue both sides to a meaningless end. Who cares what it is… care how it spreads and what follows, etc.
If they do, it will be flagged as anti-LGBTQ hate and become a bannable offense on Twitter and Reddit.