Fauci: Monkeypox Response Must Avoid Stigmatizing Gay and Bi Men
metroweekly.comAll Things Considered, that it is important to treat the virus as one that can affect anybody, even though the overwhelming majority of infected individuals have been men who have sex with men.Currently, there are 20,638 confirmed cases of monkeypox infection worldwide, and 4,639 confirmed cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The World Health Organization has recently classified the current outbreak as a public health emergency, underscoring the importance of public health officials prioritizing actions like connecting infected individuals with treatment, doing contact tracing to alert those at risk of acquiring the disease, and vaccinating those who have not yet been exposed to the virus but are among high-risk populations, such as men who have sex with men, trans women, and commercial sex workers.According to an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 98% of infected individuals, out of a sample of 528 people from 16 different countries, were gay or bisexual men.
But Fauci argues that just because the disease is prevalent in one community doesn’t mean that community should be shunned or stigmatized.
He said it’s important for the federal government to underscore that infected individuals aren’t treated like the “enemy” — much as gay and bisexual men were during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.“You reach out to the community.
You make it very easy for them to have access to testing, to treatment and to vaccine as opposed to making it a situation where people are afraid to come forward for those types of things,” Fauci said. “It’s got to be recognized who the enemy is.
