Monkeypox – conspiracy theories for advanced users …

 

… and some thoughts on prospective tests of such a theory

If you type “monkeypox” into internet search engines, the first thing that comes up is agency reports from Reuters and Co debunking “conspiracy theories” about monkeypox. The interested reader may ask: Why does this have to be mentioned so prominently? We examine what exactly could have given rise to a conspiracy theory and how, at best, this conspiracy could be checked prospectively into the future.

Monkeypox

Monkeypox, as one learns from a recent information column published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)[1], is a virus from the smallpox family that is in itself relatively harmless to humans and that usually   doesn’t choose humans, but small rodents such as gopher, prairie dogs, etc. as a final host. As a DNA virus, the monkeypox virus is much more stable and therefore mutates slowly and rarely. The doctor and biochemist writing under the alias Jochen Ziegler  in the German online magazine Achgut has written a very readable article on this. Therefore, I do not need to repeat it.

Normally, 2-4 people fall ill with it per year in our latitudes; the infectivity is low and lies under R0=1. This means that one sick person normally infects less than one other person. Therefore, the danger of an epidemic is negligible if one does not touch or come too close to the rashes of the infected. For comparison: R0 was about 2.5 to 3 at the beginning of the SARS-CoV2 spread, and is apparently higher with the Omicron variant. The figure for typical viral diseases such as measles is around 6-8.

Apparently, a significant proportion of those who have monkeypox in the USA belong to the homosexual scene and have contracted the disease during sexual intercourse. This is why, untypically, the pustules do not appear on the hands or faces of these people, but around the anal and penile regions. But beware of talking about a sexually transmitted disease; that would probably be politically incorrect.

So, there is not much to fear from normal monkeypox in our latitudes, especially since, similar to other animal pox diseases—think of cowpox, to which Jenner owed one of the first smallpox vaccines—it is relatively less aggressive and easily treatable. Moreover, the vaccine protection against human smallpox is also effective against monkeypox and this should be present in a large part of the world’s population, especially the elderly.

So, where is the excitement coming from? Where did the “conspiracy narrative” come from? These are the questions that came to my mind. And I did a little research and found what I was looking for:

The monkeypox exercise by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Munich Security Conference took place in March 2021 and is described in a November 2021 report.

If you go to the Nuclear Threat Initiative page (www.nti.org) and search for “Monkeypox”, you will not find the report. You have to go to “Reports” under “Analysis” and move backwards in time to November 2021. Then you will find the report and can download it as a PDF [2].

The report describes one of the popular simulation games hosted by the Munich Security Conference together with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in March 2021. The NTI is one of the many foundations that has formed over nuclear threat analysis. It has now taken up the issue of biosecurity together with Margaret Hamburg, the vice-president of the NTI. That lady has already done so at Event 101, the simulation in October 2019 of how an altered coronavirus coming from South America floods the world. As we know, this actually happened in a somewhat different form and from other parts of the world in December 2019; the prehistory and this exercise have been very well documented by Paul Schreyer [3]. Therefore, please forgive the agitated minds that are now crying “alarm” after seeing something similar: an exercise on an intrinsically harmless and inconspicuous pathogen is taking place about half a year before reports of the first sick people hit the media. Coincidentally, this scenario anticipated the time of the outbreak, May/June 2022, quite precisely.

I’m sure it’s all just pure coincidence. Speaking of coincidence. Here’s a little challenge for our science journalists, who I’m sure can work it out faster than me: out of the large pool of all conceivable pathogens that can cause any kind of disease in humans—from scabies to polio, from intestinal worms to elephantiasis, from monkeypox to Covid-19 pneumonia – what is the probability that the exact pathogen being discussed in an exercise will then actually emerge 6 months later at pretty much the exact time as anticipated in the exercise?

I tried to make such a calculation myself, but failed. For that, you would have to know the number of all possible pathogen types, and that is apparently hard to find. Maybe I was too lazy. But the people I asked didn’t know. Let’s take 103  as the number, i.e., 1,000 pathogen types. Then the probability of one of these being selected would be 1/103 , or 10-3 , assuming equal probabilities. Now, if the exact same selected disease actually appeared, and prominently, then, if I am not mistaken, the probability would be 10-3 * 10-3, or 10-9. That would be a probability that is no longer compatible with chance in all scientific contexts, and where we would assume systematics, or very perfect luck or bad luck. Not impossible, but very unlikely, just 10-9, one in a billion. Not included in this pile-driving mathematics are time constants, different prevalence of pathogens, etc., which of course complicate the picture.

But simply by looking at this one simple consideration, you can understand how people get the idea that there is something planned in the background. I call on all those who are familiar with these initial probabilities to calculate this a little more precisely. I think that would be a rewarding task for the science editors of the big newspapers and talk shows. I’m sure they know countless clever people who can work it out. Then the probability of such a thing happening by chance could be widely communicated, thus debunking all conspiracy theories. Because then you would know: it was quasi-random because such coincidences can happen very easily.

The scenario

The interesting thing about the exercise scenario is that it is not a real, normal, natural monkeypox virus at all, but a monkeypox virus weaponized by a terrorist state called Brinia, which lies next to the equally fictional state Arnica. It is engineered with the help of bio engineering and produced in a bioweapon laboratory with inadequate safety technology, from which it is either stolen or released. This is all made up, of course because such rogue states that circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention and make viruses more infectious do not exist in reality. In the end, 3 billion people are sick and 270 million of them die because the case-fatality rate, meaning the ratio of dead to sick, is 1:10. Every tenth sick person dies in the scenario.

Because—as opposed to normal monkeypox—the laboratory-modified monkeypox are so altered that the normal immunity that many people still have through the old smallpox vaccines does not protect them. Therefore, the old vaccines cannot simply be revived and distributed quickly, but entirely new ones have to be developed. How convenient then that we already have the mRNA and vector vaccine platforms that have been developed for SARS-CoV2.

So now, they need to be activated quickly. Ideally, according to the proposal of the people playing this game, there should be a few manufacturing states that are good at this, which then supply all the others (and are paid by them, of course). Yay, Germany can rejoice and become “vaccination world champion”. By the way, this is what Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as a candidate during the elections, said during the campaign in front of the Brandenburg Chamber of Commerce, when presenting his plan on how to pay off the huge Corona debt mountain. A participant in this event assured me he heard Scholz say that ”Germany will be vaccination world champion”.

A new international entity for bio-risk control

Perhaps the most interesting idea is that a new international “entity” is needed, like an organization. This could be a new NGO, a UN body, something that has an advisory and control function. Because, according to the logic, there are already countless “dual-use” laboratories that handle dangerous pathogens and there will be several more in the future. Because countries that have not had any so far will also want to acquire such laboratories and conduct dual-use research. That needs to be controlled. These countries need advice. There should also be a body that has an overview of who is researching where and in which direction with which pathogens, so that if another stupid accident like Covid-19 happens, we can react quickly and, if necessary, grab the rogue states by the scruff of the neck in time.

Sounds clever. But it is actually a scandal. For behind it lie two, perhaps even three implicit assumptions and admissions. “Dual-use” means research that is carried out both for medical purposes, namely to gain knowledge and develop vaccines, and for warfare. No, not to produce bioweapons. of course. After all, that is forbidden by the Biological Weapons Convention, which all states, even the USA, Russia, and China have signed. But you never know. A Brinia or some other rogue state could just undermine the Biological Weapons Convention. In that case, it is crucial to know what they might have in their arsenal to be able to defend ourselves. Then we can react proactively, perhaps we have already developed a vaccine, etc. This “dual-use” research and especially the call for its central control and registration is ultimately a clear admission of the fact that we are exposed to a permanent danger through such research. From my perspective, it is also an admission of the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic is the result of this research.

How about the idea of simply outlawing this research worldwide? No, that is too far off the mark for the monkey games panel. Instead, they assume that the number of biosafety labs will multiply in the upcoming years, especially in countries in Africa and Asia that haven’t yet started this kind of research or have little of it. So, I guess the only thing left to do is: gather data and advise the labs. One could also say that this is a form of surrendering to the accomplished facts. I find it appalling that such a simulation does not even begin to question the problems of this “dual-use” research.

Hard lockdown

In the case of monkeypox, it is clear that there will be no hesitation from the start. Because the countries that hesitate to crack down—as we learned in the Covid-19 pandemic—will have to mourn enormously high numbers of deaths. Therefore: Lockdown—hard and fast; otherwise nothing will help. Accordingly, the hard-hitters are rewarded with moderate casualties in the model, while the others suffer. Have you finally gotten the message, you Corona and monkeypox deniers?

Tax on vaccination

It is also apparent that there is far too little capacity to produce vaccines. They have to be produced really fast. And new, of course. Because the genetics of the new monkeypox virus are different from those of the wild pox. Since such things have to be reckoned with again and again, permanent cash flows of 10 billion USD annually over the next 10 years should be planned for. After all, the market for Covid-19 vaccines is already worth 150 billion dollars. So, a permanent saving pool of this size should be set up, to which all states contribute. And the management of this capital should be given “executive power”. Meaning: All states pay a pandemic control tax. Normally, the state and, within limits, the voters, by electing parties according to their election programs, have the power to decide on the allocation of taxes. This is different Here, the states no longer have the power to decide how this pandemic tax is used. But who does?

Pandemic Council

Ta-da: At this point, the scenario pulls a whole new pink rabbit out of the hat. The new international authority mentioned above. You have to think of a name for it first. I suggest “international pandemic council”. This authority has executive power—yes, you have to roll it off your tongue: power—to decide on the use of money that the countries pay. It could be used to have vaccines produced, for example, by certain companies. It also has the power to order and allocate these vaccines. This is all just part of this simulation game, of course, not a reality.

Science Control

Another brand-new idea: Journals and editors should install a biosecurity review in advance so that dangerous information is not published in the first place. That’s not stupid at all. If certain information about new virus manipulations such as [4] had not been published, it would have been more complicated to understand what actually happened in the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. I think it is completely naïve to believe that the world will be a safer place if the labs that do such research can no longer publish the results in Science, Nature or Cell. Then the labs keep their knowledge to themselves and exchange it informally.

But of course, you can also use such a new biosecurity review to block out unwelcome information: if scientists want to publish information that contradicts what the Pandemic Council decides, then this new biosecurity review will take effect without further ado. Where will we end up if the likes of Walach, Ioannidis, and other scatterbrains of this world can simply publish what they think is right? Of course, the journals cooperate voluntarily.

From the original text: “Support effective pre-publication biosecurity review. The entity could collaborate with editors and publishers to improve biosecurity review of manuscripts and reduce the risks of public release of information hazards (i.e., information that may increase risks of intentional misuse of bioscience knowledge and biotechnology capabilities).”

After all, it’s only for our highest good that no dangerous information about pathogens is released, just as one should keep dangerous pathogens inside the laboratory. Information is at least as infectious as pathogens. Well observed. Therefore: general cooperation and control.

Of course, there are also some very clever and not self-evident insights: You have to secure the supply chains. The best way to do this is to stockpile important goods in advance, according to the experts. Listen up, all househusbands: Rush to the supermarket and buy toilet paper, pasta and canned tomatoes!

A clever innovation: no binary pandemic criteria, but staggered alert levels

The panel correctly recognized that the current practice of the WHO to declare a pandemic requires improvement. Currently, there is a non-publicly operating WHO committee that declares the state of Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) based on various assessments, i.e., pandemic, yes or no. This is truly not transparent and prone to error. Moreover, this binary system would tempt people to wait too long before acting. That is probably also true. Therefore, there must be new criteria, which should be developed both at the national and international level and which should contain clear trigger criteria, starting with when a specific level of danger is declared, like a traffic light kind of warning system from green to orange to red; or even with more levels. Countries should also do this according to their specific situations. This would allow them to adapt supply capacities, hospital beds, etc. locally. This assessment should be made by an international, publicly accountable body of experts.

I think this is a very clever idea, because the redefinition of the pandemic criterion and the non-transparent handling of it have been massively criticized. The fact that different points of view are to be represented in this committee is also a hopeful sign, as is the fact that gradations are being discussed.

The players

Who took the trouble to cook up these thoughts? At the beginning you find the participants who played and at the back, on p.27, the experts who developed the scenario. You find quite a few familiar names: The heads of the Bill and Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations are there, the Welcome Trust, Dr. Gao from the Chinese Academy of Science, a few people from the pharmaceutical industry, Margaret Hamburg, who used to be at the FDA and is now vice-president of the NTI, Dr. Nkengasong from the African Centre for Prevention and Infection Control, two WHO or UN representatives and from Germany we find Dr. Leiss from the Centre for International Cooperation.

Among the experts, too, one encounters familiar names: Jennifer Nuzzo from the Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, as the Johns Hopkins University will set up the dashboard. Homeland Security is represented, the US military’s bioweapons specialists. New to the mix is the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, founded by Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of the transhumanist movement, and the largest think tank for transhumanist concepts and security against degenerate artificial intelligence. The Pandemic Action Network is represented by co-founder Carolyn Reynolds. According to its self-description, it is a network of over 250 actors and individuals who have joined forces to end the Covid-19 pandemic. The success of this action will probably be judged differently. But clearly some decision making will of course have to be handed over to such experts, for the next pandemic, I mean. Could it be that the international pandemic council will conveniently be handed over to this very NGO? We will see.

The parameters

The model is in the attachment further down at the end of this text. I recommend that all journalists read it carefully and memorize the main points. It is conceivable that the RKI or Imperial College or another institution will soon present a model that calculates what will happen concerning the monkeypox epidemic in the future and conveniently adopt some of these parameters. Because that’s easier than empiricism and careful documentation.

The model is based on a simplistic epidemiological SEIR – susceptible, exposed, infected, recovered—model. Simplistic because no immunity is assumed and natural immunity to viral diseases is thoroughly ignored. Then the model assumes that there are mild cases, 50% of which later have to be hospitalized, severe cases, 40% of which end up in intensive care units and half of which die, a total of 10% of all cases. There are no asymptomatic cases. The infection period of a mild infection is 14 days, the pre-symptomatic period is 8 days. These three parameters—no asymptomatic cases, the duration of infection—are the only ones taken from the known monkeypox literature. Everything else is pure fantasy. Never mind, it’s just a game.

These model parameters are used to calculate what happens when a country reacts harshly and appropriately, or moderately or completely inappropriately. In the first case, the reproduction rate quickly falls below 1. In the second case it takes a while, in the third it does not succeed to contain the outbreak. Quite like the completely inadequate model presented by Imperial College and the RKI for SARS-CoV2 [5, 6].

The result: as I said, 3 billion sick people worldwide and almost 300 million dead, or 10%.

Prospective testing

We can now apply the strategy already discussed:

We consider what happens if this scenario is a simulation in the sense that the monkeypox outbreak was actually planned and if it was a very unlikely coincidence that the simulation chose monkeypox of all things.

The latter is simple: if it was a fluke, nothing much happens except a bit of media hype now that Covid-19 is slowly losing its charm. But that too will pass.

If it was a plan, this is what is going to happen:

The number of cases will increase rapidly – “exponentially”. Conveniently, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, presumably led by Jennifer Nuzzo, who is in on the whole thing, will generate a dashboard that counts the cases. At the same time, a new model calculation will be published, presumably in Science or Nature or on a corresponding website, which will have a striking resemblance to the one in the scenario paper. Perhaps even written by the scenario’s authors themselves (Yassif, O’Prey, Isaac) or colleagues? The RKI will adopt the model relatively unchanged. The Macrons and Söders of this world will want to use dramatic speeches to convince citizens that without lockdown, we have no chance of escaping doom. The Bhakdis and Hockertzes of this world no longer exist. Therefore, there will be little opposition this time.

Relatively quickly, the Drostens of this world will discover that the virus has a very perfidious “mutation” that enables it to escape vaccination protection and makes it very infectious, much more infectious than normal monkeypox. So, panic is quickly spread in the mainstream news: a new killer virus. This time, other Drostens will have developed a new PCR test that is “quite specific” for this virus. Later it will turn out: a cross-reaction with other viruses of similar type, hamster-, cow-, mouse-, wind- and whatever-pox not excluded. This time, the money printing machine of PCR tests will probably not go to Germany, but to France or the USA.

The vaccine industry will turn on the kettle and generate vaccines. Since it worked so well before, EMA, FDA and co. will wipe all need for studies off the table or thin them out so that a study will be on the table in three months, for appearance’s sake, and in this case, a vaccine may even be available 4 months after the pandemic is declared.

Presumably, Bill Gates will then announce on Austrian and German television on Christmas that he will graciously come forward with the billions that the production and distribution of the vaccines will cost, but that it would be nice if governments paid back their debt. That he and his foundations have long since made this money on the Covid-19-vaccine-machinery needs no mention. It is, after all, common knowledge.

The major publishers may get together and decide on a biosecurity pre-review for papers to be published on this topic. The interpretation of “biosecurity” will be broad. Both papers that want to publish dangerous pathogen information and those that are critical of the general mindset will be affected.

In the age of AI, this is easy to do. The people from Google and Oxford can help: You just have to enter a few code words—Monkeypox, for example. An AI system of the efficiency of commercial systems already available checks the result and the semantic context, and the censorship machine is ready and there’s an end to scientific plurality. Finally. We have. Just one. Truth.

And at the same time, the UN will discuss creating a new pandemic preparedness instrument. In any case, it will be the requested body that collects the countries’ pandemic taxes and then distributes them among the producing countries, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the US, China, perhaps India and Nigeria. We can already start buying Johnson&Johnson and Merck shares. Because they will probably go up because these companies will produce the vaccines.

Well, maybe a few unforeseen things will happen, e.g. the population no longer wants to play pandemics?

Finally, as a few awake heads might already have noticed: In the simulation, the monkeypox outbreak was moved to May/June 2022. When was the first case discovered? I think May 2022.

The interesting thing about prophecies is: if you take them seriously, you usually prevent their anticipated outcome. The stupid thing is that they are often not taken seriously. See Cassandra.

Actually, such a game is scandalous in itself. Because it presupposes, unquestionably and as a matter of course, that the Biological Weapons Convention—which prohibits tampering with biological systems to make them more dangerous—is not being observed. No one gets upset about it any more because it’s happening everywhere. In the USA. In China. In Germany. In France and God knows where else. That is the real scandal: that gain-of-function research is being done everywhere. It’s is outlawed, but no one actually controls or monitors this law. Least of all our press, which should actually have this function when governments don’t do their job. Because if the whole gain of function research didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have SARS-CoV2, and we wouldn’t have to worry about possibly modified monkeypox.

Dear governments: How about an effective gain-of-function research control instead of lockdowns? It’s easy: turn off the money tap. Dear UN: How about an effective ban on this nonsense instead of pandemic panels? It’s not that difficult: countries that don’t comply will be outlawed. Dear press, dear daily news: How about a barrage of film documentaries on the many bioweapons and gain-of-function laboratories of this world and also of this republic for a change? Thar would be something new, for a change!


Sources and literature

  1. Harris E. What to Know About Monkeypox. JAMA. 2022. doi: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2022.9499.
  2. Yassif JM, O’prey Kp, Isaacn CR. Strengthening Global Systems to Prevent and Respond to High-Consequence Biological Threats. Results from the 2021 Tabletop Exercise Conducted in Partnership with the Munich Security Convference. Washington: Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2021 November 2021. Report No.
  3. Schreyer P. Chronik einer angekündigten Krise: Wie ein Virus die Welt verändern könnte. Frankfurt: Westend; 2020.
  4. Menachery VD, Yount BL, Debbink K, Agnihothram S, Gralinski LE, Plante JA, et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nature Medicine. 2015;21(12):1508-13. doi: 10.1038/nm.3985.
  5. Ferguson N, Laydon D, Nedjati Gilani G, Imai N, Ainslie K, Baguelin M, et al. Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand. London: Imperial College, 2020.
  6. an der Heiden M, Buchholz U. Modellierung von Beispielszenarien der SARS-CoV-2-Epidemie 2020 in Deutschland. Berlin: Robert Koch Institut, 2020.

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