This New TikTok Conspiracy Theory Is Dumb and Dangerous
Reading Time: 4 minutesTikTok Conspiracy Theorists Are Convinced That Mpox Will Lead to a ‘Second Lockdown’, Mpox is a serious global health issue. But it’s nothing like the coronavirus., Mpox: Why TikTok conspiracy theorists are saying a ‘second lockdown’ is going to happen.
This article was republished from Sequencer and has been lightly edited for MediaDownloader.
A new public health rumor is making the rounds on TikTok. People are apparently worried that a ‘second lockdown’ is imminent, this time caused by mpox (formerly known as monkeypox)—a virus in the pox family that causes fluid-filled blisters and can spread from person to person via close contact or sex.
I cannot stress enough how unfounded this fear is. The videos I’ve seen spreading this conspiracy theory seem to come from high schoolers in the U.S. who are confused about a recent headline. The World Health Organization declared last week that the ongoing mpox outbreak in central Africa is now a public health emergency of international concern. The ‘global health emergency’ line clearly struck a chord with some people, who have tried to connect the red string to the WHO’s January 2020 declaration of a public health emergency of international concern for COVID-19. But these misguided sleuths are trying to decrypt coded messages from a bowl of alphabet soup.
There’s no conspiracy to force a second lockdown, and the WHO doesn’t have the authority to cancel your homecoming dance, much less impose global stay-at-home orders. What this trend can do, however, is funnel oxygen from a very real, ongoing public health crisis and weaken faith in some of the only organizations doing anything about it.
Here’s the obligatory debunking section of this story, starting with the fact that this is not even the first time that the WHO has declared mpox a global public health emergency. In July 2022, the declaration came after 75 countries and territories reported tens of thousands of cases of sexually transmitted mpox. That outbreak never really ended so much as it slowed down: Taking a look at the number of cases globally reported to the WHO, there’s a precipitous rise in the summer of 2022 with a long tail of hundreds of monthly reported cases stretching well into 2024. These recent numbers might be an undercount due to countries’ slow and incomplete reporting, but the data were persuasive enough for the WHO to make a determination of the virus’s ongoing risk to the public. This July, the global public health agency determined that mpox’s risk to the general population in places like North America was low.
The current mpox public health emergency stems from a different clade (a fancy biology word for ‘related group’) of the virus that has primarily affected the Democratic Republic of Congo. Children have borne the brunt of the outbreak in the DRC. Their immune systems are generally weaker, especially if undernutrition is in the mix. The virus is also spreading at high rates in the country among sex workers and men who have sex with men. Most concerningly from the ‘international’ standpoint of ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ four nearby countries reported their first mpox cases this past month, and last week Sweden identified the first case of mpox from this clade outside of Africa.
It remains to be seen whether this current mpox outbreak will make it to the U.S. like the 2022 outbreak did. To be sure, there’s great reason to be concerned about all deadly infectious disease outbreaks, not just the ones that fall within our borders. That said, it’s actively unproductive to fret about a lockdown in a country that has thus far not reported any cases from this clade of mpox.
Moreover, I’m not aware of any health agencies that have proposed lockdowns to control cases of mpox, even in the regions at the heart of this outbreak. It just wouldn’t make sense, given what we know about how this disease spreads. It takes between 3 and 17 days for an infected person to develop symptoms, and the virus is spread through close contact (touching the rash or scabs of an infected person; coming into contact with saliva, mucus, and other bodily fluids; or sharing objects that were used by someone with mpox). Prior to the first symptoms—which could be fever and swollen lymph nodes followed by the characteristic rash, or straight to the rash—a person isn’t contagious.
Contrast that to COVID, which spreads asymptomatically and can lead to a contagious case in several days, and it’s clear why a more aggressive public health response worked there to reduce case numbers and deaths. Fighting mpox with extreme forms of social distancing would be like bringing a knife to a pillow fight: The response is ill-suited to the problem, and it makes a mess in the process.
The virus belongs to the same genus as the smallpox virus, which is as similar as SARS, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS viruses are to each other. In broad terms, viruses belonging to the same genus can cause disease in the same ways and present with similar symptoms: Both coronavirus and SARS bind to the ACE2 receptor to infect cells, while smallpox and mpox both cause raised bumps. But unlike COVID, mpox has been spreading to humans since at least 1972. And its relation to other scary diseases actually helps our fight against it immensely, since scientists realized during the last outbreak that vaccines designed for smallpox actually do a pretty great job at preventing mpox disease, too. (Vaccines are a whole other can of worms, though, since their efficacy against this mpox clade isn’t clear, and procuring and delivering doses to under-resourced countries are sadly not top priorities for richer countries.)
I’m struck by the demographic sharing this viral scientific misinformation. As a connoisseur of wacky internet conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, I don’t typically see high schoolers spreading fearmongering copypasta (that’s usually Facebook grandmothers and the like). This trend makes me think there’s some collective trauma shared among America’s youth that’s worthy of analysis. Today’s teens came of age during COVID-19, experiencing lockdown at the age typically meant for gaining autonomy and developing social identities. Both teen girls and boys spent more time on social media during the pandemic, and it’s not a stretch to say their relationships to these platforms changed because of it.
It’s understandable why many young people now associate public health emergencies with one big, formative public health emergency—and now falsely think that all the public health measures from that crisis must accompany others. But I’m concerned that anxiety seems to be prompting knee-jerk reactions that teens are taking a step further when they post misinformation online. If promulgating conspiracy theories about a second lockdown is the newest trend, I don’t want to be a part of it.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG