By Thomas E. Levy, MD, JD - June 4, 2022
As of the writing of this article, multiple news reports have recently addressed the occurrence of monkeypox virus infections in humans.
In the current setting of the entire planet dealing with the COVID pandemic over the last two and a half years, fear is readily stoked that another pandemic with a virus that comes from the same family of viruses as smallpox could be poised to inflict widespread suffering and death.
This article will present the significant scientific data and literature surrounding monkeypox infection in humans, which clearly demonstrates that the monkeypox virus presents NO threat of a pandemic or even a large epidemic.
Monkeypox Characteristics
Although many have never heard of it until recently, monkeypox infection is not the result of the emergence of a new virus. Rather, it was first identified in captive cynomolgus monkeys in Denmark in 1958. [1] The first documented human infection was reported in 1970 in a 9-month-old in the Congo. After clinically recovering from the infection and its associated rash over a month-long period, this baby then contracted the measles and died six days later. [2]
While not found exclusively in remote populations in Central and West Africa, limited monkeypox outbreaks appear to have occurred most commonly in such areas of the world, where advanced malnutrition can potentially make some otherwise benign infections life-threatening. [3] This initial case also serves to highlight the fact that underlying chronic malnutrition with moderate to severely depleted vitamin and mineral stores in those living in such remote areas of Africa literally sets the stage for contracting any infectious disease.
Quickly contracting measles upon the resolution of the monkeypox virus is the logical result of such an advanced depletion of nutrients in the body. The typical mild to moderate clinical presentation of the measles can easily evolve into a fatal infection when a chronic state of nutrient depletion is still further depleted by a month-long bout with the monkeypox virus.
Monkeypox cases have only occurred as very limited outbreaks, never as an epidemic or a pandemic. Such an outbreak is a cluster of cases in a given area from a pathogen with a limited contagion risk. An epidemic/pandemic requires a pathogen that is very easily spread. This is not the case with the monkeypox virus. The United States has already had an outbreak of monkeypox infection in 2003, involving 47 human cases felt to be secondary to the importation of infected wild rodents from Ghana.
No secondary larger outbreak or epidemic resulted, however. Furthermore, no human-to-human transmission was documented. [4] Typically, while human-to-human transmission is certainly possible, it is the exposure to and/or the consumption of infected animals, as well as their consumption of each other, that both spreads this virus and serves as a reservoir for it. This is an additional reason for its primary presence in Africa, in addition to the overall poor nutrition on much of this continent. [5,6]
Monkeypox is characterized as a zoonotic infection, meaning it can transmit from animal to human, or vice-versa. [7] Asymptomatic monkeypox infections are very common, as over half of the healthy persons in an area of Ghana, which actually had no reported clinical human cases of monkeypox at the time of this study, had positive immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies against the monkeypox virus genus. [8]
A similarly large percentage of the healthy residents in a region of the Congo had circulating antibodies as well. [9] Another study in Cameroon found these antibodies in slightly over a third of the subjects tested. [10] This indicates that monkeypox is not typically severe in its clinical course, much less fatal, in any human population. And this would especially be the case in the United States or in a comparable country with a relatively high-quality level of nutrition as well as a relatively widespread intake of vitamin and mineral supplementation.
Ebola, another virus that has been largely limited to African countries, resulted in a substantial outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016, but it never approached pandemic or even significant epidemic proportions. Nevertheless, in the nutrition-depleted populations in which it emerged, death resulted in those individuals demonstrating clinical infection between 25 and 90 percent of the time, enough to generate a great deal of fear that it could spread and kill easily throughout the world. [11]
And even though Ebola killed many who became infected, a substantial number of those individuals exposed developed natural immunity (IgG antibody) response without ever becoming clinically ill. Depending on the location of the African community and the conditions of the testing protocol itself, up to 50 percent of exposed individuals, including those living with clinically infected individuals, showed the development of natural antibodies to Ebola without ever becoming ill. [12-18]
And in spite of the initial fear that was generated, no pandemic, epidemic, or even minor outbreak of Ebola ever occurred in the United States, even though international airline travel reliably introduced infected individuals into the country. [19,20]
Most of the fear currently seen with the potential spread of the monkeypox virus is due to the fact that both monkeypox and smallpox comes from the same genus of DNA viruses. [21] Smallpox has been estimated to have killed between 300 and 500 million people in the 20th century. [22] Understandably, then, anything that is remotely related to smallpox can be expected to generate a great deal of concern.
While the smallpox vaccine is credited for the effective eradication of smallpox, it is also believed by some that waning vaccine immunity is currently leaving over 70 percent of the world’s population unprotected against smallpox, as this vaccine has not been routinely administered since 1980. [23] Some estimates indicate that the smallpox vaccination has offered roughly an 85 percent protection against monkeypox infection. [24] And since the vaccine immunity against smallpox is felt to be waning, the associated cross-immunity against related viruses like monkeypox is felt to be fading as well. [25]
However, monkeypox is simply not smallpox. The evidence presented above indicates that many asymptomatic infections occur with monkeypox, and that it is far less contagious than smallpox, with human-to-human transmission being decidedly uncommon. Concurrent epidemics or outbreaks of smallpox and monkeypox have not been reported, and smallpox is not a zoonotic infection like monkeypox, but infects humans only. [26]
Finally, in the more well-fed and healthy populations in the world, monkeypox is simply not a killer virus once contracted. The typical clinical course of monkeypox in such populations much more resembles chickenpox than smallpox. Even if the presumed waning protection of the old smallpox vaccinations results in some increase in human monkeypox cases, it will not turn monkeypox into the highly contagious and deadly killer that is smallpox.
Easily Prevented, Readily Resolved
While some viruses are much more contagious and much more capable of causing severe illness and even death than others, they all share therapeutic susceptibilities. As devastating as Ebola has been to many of the individuals in Africa who have contracted it, bio-oxidative treatment readily resolves it as well as any other virus that is treated before too much advanced organ damage has already taken place . . .
[SNIP]
