As Americans try to put Covid behind us, another frightening virus has invaded our country: monkeypox, which causes hideous disfigurement one might see in a science fiction horror movie. Monkeypox originated in Africa and was kept out of our country by President Trump, but Biden has allowed it to spread to 47 of our 50 states.
The Democrat Governors of California, Illinois, and New York have declared a state of emergency, as New York City did last Saturday and San Francisco did Thursday before that. San Francisco’s mayor absurdly declared that the virus “impacts everyone equally” although nearly all cases have occurred in men who recently had sex with other men.
The Biden administration has failed to develop testing and quarantine protocols for this dreadful new virus, as his Cabinet tiptoes around political correctness about it. A week ago this administration presented Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is married to another man and is Democrats’ frontrunner for president based on the latest New Hampshire poll, to explain Biden’s monkeypox policy to CNN.
Pete Buttigieg claimed then that the Biden administration was “working aggressively” against this virus, when asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether it was “doing enough to stop the spread of monkeypox.” Liberal CNN omitted questions about blocking monkeypox at our southern border, after cases were discovered on the Mexico side in early June.
“Are there any measures that you think airlines and trains and buses need to take to stop further spread,” the Secretary of Transportation was asked by CNN. “Such as implementing enhanced screening for symptoms at airports and train stations?”
Yet Buttigieg had no answer to that obvious question, and moved on to repeat his canned talking points. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has no real qualifications to become president but the intense push by wealthy Democrats for an LGBTQ married man to lead the White House makes Buttigieg their presumptive nominee after Biden.
Buttigieg is on record as opposing religious exemptions from vaccination, so if Biden has his way then millions of federal and healthcare workers, plus the military, may soon be subjected to a mandatory monkeypox vaccine. Meanwhile, the Biden administration shockingly allowed the 20 million doses of this vaccine to expire.
“This outbreak must be met with urgency, action, and resources, both nationally and globally,” the New York City mayor Eric Adams declared. He viewed Covid with such senseless seriousness that unvaccinated Brooklyn basketball star Kyrie Irving was banned from playing and he cheered his team from the stands in close proximity to other fans.
In the early days of the Covid pandemic, ordinary Americans were harshly fined and even imprisoned for keeping their small businesses open to eke out a living for themselves. Yet nothing of this sort is even suggested for dealing with monkeypox and festivals or parades spreading it.
“People are so worried about being politically correct that they are unable to function,” Trump once observed. The costly inaction by the Biden Administration on monkeypox seems to be due to its fear of crossing the LGBTQ community in any way.
Public health officials are focusing more on trying to change the name of “monkeypox” rather than limiting it. While the virus was spreading rapidly in New York City last week, its public health commissioner Ashwin Vasan sent a letter to the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urging him to rename monkeypox because of “potentially devastating and stigmatizing effects.”
The WHO names diseases, not viruses. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) has that responsibility, and it properly rebuffed this politically driven demand by Democrats to change the name of this virus, which should not have a candy-coated name.
That Committee informed NPR that the term “monkey” will probably remain part of any new name given to the virus, which may not be modified for a year or two anyway. Its data secretary informed NPR “the consensus is that use of the name ‘monkey’ is sufficiently separated from any pejorative context such that there is no reason for any change.”
Democrats know that letting the “monkeypox” virus into our country is not good for Biden’s approval rating and their chances in the upcoming midterm elections, but they should be held politically accountable for failing to keep this virus out of our country. When President Obama let the Ebola virus into the United States shortly before the midterm elections in 2014, Republicans gained 9 seats and a commanding control of the U.S. Senate.
“The window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently told CBS. That means monkeypox could sink Democrats further in the upcoming midterm elections, as yet another failure by the Biden administration to secure the American borders against foreign harm.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.