from jeff Childers

I’ll keep following the monkeypox story because it is a great example of media hysteria, and because it suggests something mysterious and unidentified could be weakening immune systems and giving old diseases new life, and not because the disease poses any kind of real threat to anybody. Your chances of choking on a Brazilian olive pit are higher than the risks of catching this gross skin disease.

Anyway, Reuters ran a story yesterday headlined, “Britain Offers Smallpox Shot As Monkeypox Cases Spread In Europe.” It says that the shots are being offered to healthcare workers and “those who may have been exposed to the virus.” That was fast.

Who are the folks who may have been exposed to the virus? Reuters said “in Britain, the UKHSA has highlighted that the recent cases in the country were predominantly among men who self-identified as gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men.” Oh. Jimmy Whitworth, professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explained “this isn’t going to cause a nationwide epidemic like COVID did.”

Oh no? Well then let’s cover it 24 x 7 with breathless breaking reports!

? I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just reminding you that in November 2020, Forbes ran a nice vaccine explainer headlined “Here’s What You Need To Know About AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 Vaccine.”

One of the things Forbes thought you should know is how the most widely-used covid vaccine in Europe, AstraZeneca, was developed. The financial mag explained:

> “The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored vaccine. This means that the company took a virus that normally infects chimpanzees, and genetically modified it to avoid any possible disease consequences in people.”

They used a genetically modified monkey virus. That’s a weird coincidence, don’t you think?

You want to hear another weird coincidence? In November of last year, a “global security” NGO called NTI reported that it had “partnered with the Munich Security Conference to conduct a tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats.”

Thank goodness.

The particular threat that they looked at was … an outbreak of a genetically modified strain of monkeypox. According to NTI, “The fictional exercise scenario portrayed a deadly, global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus that first emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months.”

Here’s the link to NTI’s announcement

https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/strengthening-global-systems-to-prevent-and-respond-to-high-consequence-biological-threats/