Admit it: monkeypox is kind of funny
When monkeypox crept onto the scene last month, with a handful of confirmed cases in the US, it seemed too absurd to be taken seriously by anyone who’d been paying attention over the last two years. Americans wised up to media malfeasance and career scammers in our health bureaucracies, rolled their eyes and thought, here we go again. The name itself, monkeypox, couldn’t be scarier — like something from a doomsday novel, or cooked up in an editorial meeting to provoke maximum panic. White liberals — the inexhaustible, ever-dutiful and poised-for-action enforcers of tyranny — had a different issue: the name’s racist.
