Since cases of monkeypox began appearing in Europe, beliefs about the virus have been widely shared on social media that appear to have been recycled by the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are no plans for a monkeypox lockdown
Concerns that there will be restrictions on movement are being widely expressed online. While fears about a monkeypox outbreak are understandable, scientists say this virus is not like Covid and most experts think its spread will be limited.
It is much harder to transmit than Covid, we already have vaccines and treatments available, and people only seem to be infectious after symptoms appear – making detection and isolation easier.
So restrictions such as lockdowns or mass vaccinations "really aren't going to be the way to respond to this," says Prof Peter Horby, director of the Centre for Pandemic Sciences at the University of Oxford.
Instead, isolation measures and vaccines are currently targeted at infected people or their close contacts.
Dr Rosamund Lewis, of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Emergencies Programme, confirmed that there is no need for mass vaccination and the WHO has come out against any travel restrictions.
There is no evidence that it was released by a laboratory.
It's no surprise that people's minds now turn to Covid when news of an unknown virus breaks.
But the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has noted that the recent outbreaks of monkeypox are "reviving the spread of a series of modified conspiracies" which have been used over the past two years to deceive people during the Covid pandemic.
Social media accounts and news outlets in Ukraine, Russia, China and the US have all made accusations that the outbreak was the result of a laboratory leak, or the use of monkeypox as a biological weapon.
However, it is possible to identify where a virus is likely to have come from by sequencing its DNA. Geneticist Fatima Tokhmafshan compares this to scanning a barcode on a parcel to “identify the different routes [it] has taken.”
The genetic sequences we have so far for the virus all trace it to the type of monkeypox that commonly circulates in West Africa: "This tells us that this is not something manufactured."
There were a handful of cases in the UK in 2018 and 2021, and a larger outbreak in the US, also in 2021, each brought by human or imported animal travel channels.
"So it's entirely plausible that this is exactly what happened this time," says Prof Horby.
The earliest case identified in the UK in the current outbreak was traced to someone who had travelled from Nigeria.
As for the idea that monkeypox escaped from a laboratory, "there is absolutely no basis for this claim," says Prof Horby.
There is no evidence that the explosion was planned.
There are those claiming online that the current outbreak of monkeypox was deliberately planned – with many pointing the finger at Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci, in an echo of Covid conspiracies.
This unfounded claim is being spread across Russian media, on the Chinese social app Weibo and on Instagram. It can also be found on Facebook in Romanian, German, English, Arabic, French, Slovenian, Hungarian and Punjabi.
The claims point to a document prepared by a US-based biosecurity organization, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
In 2021, NTI held a workshop to encourage leaders from around the world to plan for the possibility of future pandemics.
Participants were asked to work through an imaginary scenario – a “deadly global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus… [that] spread globally”.
“The dangers posed by monkeypox,” according to NTI, “have been well documented for years” and cases are on the rise, making it an obvious virus to choose for this seminar.
Outbreaks of infection are a fact of life, so an organization that anticipates and plans for them is not inherently suspicious.
(Full article at BBC)