Color Cockburn shocked that the medical establishment is once again enforcing political correctness.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently issued a letter begging the World Health Organization to rename the highly contagious monkeypox virus. Why? They were concerned the word “monkeypox” was offensive to minorities.
Cockburn — and Twitter for that matter — know this is a misalignment of priorities. Some names are purely innocent and playing PC police is not the job of the NYC Department of Health. Also why is it that New York authorities hear “monkeypox” and immediately think about black and brown people? Physician, heal thyself!
And how far are we supposed to take this? Should the names “Black Plague” and “Yellow Fever” be renamed for insinuating racism?
Of course, the Department’s suggestion is to change the name to “MPV,” which stands for “monkeypox virus.” How creative.
The NYC Department of Health has one job: keep New York healthy. In this case, that means keeping monkeypox cases low. By focusing on suppressing stigma instead of amplifying treatment, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
NBC Out, which shows content “about, and of interest to, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community,” reported last week that a New England Journal of Medicine paper concluded that 95 percent of monkeypox transmissions were “during sex between men.”
If one group is disproportionately affected, the loving thing to do is to warn them properly — not to sweep it under the rug so as not to offend the woke lobby on behalf of a different group.
Instead of playing PC police, Cockburn thinks the NYC Department of Health should focus on its mission of tending to the largest outbreak of the virus in the nation.
