Doctors Urge Calm as Right-Wingers Lie About Kids and Monkeypox

[Celerity]

“The European countries that have reported paediatric cases have reported one or two cases, and so the virus isn’t spreading among kids,” said Dr. Kristina Bryant.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/doctors-urge-calm-as-right-wingers-lie-about-kids-and-monkeypox



With the American monkeypox outbreak in a state of uncontrolled spread, public health authorities are concerned that outdated science and bad-faith scapegoating are combining forces to frighten parents about the epidemic’s threat to their children.

Epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and public health authorities are in near-universal agreement that the current outbreak appears to pose low risk to kids at the moment. But as far-right figures tie the virus to baseless panic about LGBT people “grooming” children, and as some media outlets and online influencers speculate that monkeypox could flourish in school settings, those assurances risk being drowned out.

“The few kids infected have been close household contacts of cases,” emphasized Dr. David Freedman, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama and an expert in tropical diseases. “I just don’t think that silent carriage into a school setting is a big risk unless guidelines are completely ignored.”

The tangle of unintentional misinformation and purposeful disinformation has grown in recent weeks as leading far-right conservative figures and conspiracy theorists have latched on to a handful of paediatric cases as proof that gay men are sexually abusing children on a mass scale.

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