County Super-supervisor Fletcher says vaccines are not enough: “We must fight the real enemy.”

A Pox on the Pox

Author

By Walter Mencken

Publish Date

Aug. 12, 2022

Super-supervisor Fletcher: “We must not let monkeypox make a monkey out of us. But it will be difficult. On the one hand, the coronavirus taught us that we must sometimes take drastic measures to stop the spread: closing businesses, churches, and schools; preventing public gatherings that are not political protests; and all the rest of it. On the other hand, the disease’s outbreak in this case seems to be mostly spread through sexual contact, and it’s not like we can ask people to stop having sex. This is America. And more to the point, this is California, which, as Governor Newsom has reminded us recently, is the Freedom State. How can we follow his call to Choose Freedom if we can’t even Free Willy?”

Last week, as case numbers in San Diego County continued to rise, San Diego public health officials declared a public health emergency in response to the recent monkeypox outbreak. In a speech praising the move, Super-supervisor Nathan Fletcher offered the following statement: “In January of 2021, as part of my declaration of racism as a public health crisis, I took the bold step of condemning the coronavirus for its racist behavior: infecting, hospitalizing, and killing Blacks and Latinxes at much higher rates than whites. Sadly, it seems that history is repeating itself while at the same time moving backward, because now we face another pandemic, monkeypox, and another public emergency. This time, we have a disease that disproportionately infects gay men. Sometimes, I feel as though nature itself is not only racist, but homophobic. In that case, it is the duty of every San Diegan to take a stand against nature. Because if we don’t, then even if we defeat the monkeypox, we will have lost.”