A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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A rally in New York City calling for more government action to combat monkeypox Jeenah Moon/Getty |
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The thing about the monkeypox outbreak is that, so far, it’s been incredibly predictable. Epidemiologists and ecologists have been foreseeing a rapid spike in zoonotic diseases, which spread from animals to humans, for years. Covid-19 was one zoonotic disease. Monkeypox is another. TNR emphasized the growing danger of zoonotic disease outbreaks many times in the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. And this April, Nature published a paper titled “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk.” What the paper clarified in devastating detail, as Melody Schreiber wrote for TNR, is that “Covid-19 wasn’t the outlier, a once-in-a-century tragedy. It’s a glimpse of the future, especially if we don’t take steps now to understand the intricate and inextricable links between the planet’s health and our own.” So given that we’ve had a two-year heads-up on zoonotic disease risk in the form of Covid-19, you really would have hoped the public health apparatus wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. Instead, as monkeypox started spreading in the United States, news broke that 28 of the 30 million Jynneos pox vaccines that the U.S. has been accumulating for its stockpile since 2010 have expired. Last week, Melody spoke to one man who had tried to get the monkeypox vaccine in New York City ahead of Pride festivities. Like many, he wasn’t able to get an appointment. And when he subsequently contracted monkeypox, he faced a bewildering number of hurdles to obtain antivirals and topical treatment to ease his pain. “Every single doctor’s office, if they haven’t worked out a standard symptomatic care plan, what are they doing?” he asked. “Come on! This has been going on for, what, two and a half months now?” |
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Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves agreed. “There should have been a war room at the CDC,” he told Melody. “We need an emergency response that’s across agencies, across levels of government—federal, local, and state. Yet it’s all been a very seat-of-your-pants approach to this, with some resignation and ambivalence about whether it’s important enough to pull the fire alarm. The fire alarm should’ve been pulled weeks ago.” One obvious—if uncomfortable—explanation here is that the U.S. has a long history of downplaying diseases that circulate predominantly in certain populations. And right now, most monkeypox cases in the U.S. are occurring among men who have sex with men—a fact experts worry will be used to dismiss or stigmatize those who contract the virus. An equally enraging truth, however, is that U.S. policymakers have trouble prioritizing public health, period. Too often, it’s seen as pedestrian compared to flashier threats involving “bad guys.” As The New York Times noted in a report published this morning, the U.S. possesses another stockpile of pox vaccines in Denmark that it has been agonizingly slow to deploy. The stockpile was originally created in part for use against bioterrorism, and several people the Times interviewed wondered whether the government has been reluctant to use it in a natural outbreak. “The U.S. government intentionally de-prioritized gay men’s health in the midst of an out-of-control outbreak because of a potential bioterrorist threat that does not currently exist,” one gay health activist told the Times. Times reporters did not get a government source to confirm this narrative. But given America’s track record on diseases that disproportionately affect the gay community (or, frankly, health issues in any community that isn’t the one in power), it’s a pretty reasonable theory. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Community gardens can help prevent or mitigate flash flooding in cities, a New York Times piece points out this week. |
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Eastern Massachusetts—not typically known as wildfire central—has seen an uptick in fires in the past few weeks as drought continues throughout the entire state. The northeast and central parts of the state are currently in a Level 3 (a.k.a. “critical”) drought and are being urged to halt all nonessential water use. |
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That’s how much the waters of the Dardenne Creek in Missouri rose in a single hour when heavy rainfall hit the St. Louis area early Tuesday morning, causing massive flooding. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
The BBC has a piece on E. Bruce Harrison, the man who might be credited with killing climate policy in the 1990s. Harrison ran a messaging campaign for the Global Climate Coalition, or GCC—a lobbying group of fossil fuel companies and other businesses that opposed any policies to reduce emissions. The campaign involved amplifying the voices of climate skeptics in the media and writing briefing sheets for reporters that claimed there was no evidence that human activity caused climate change. |
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In a document dating from around 1995, shared with the BBC by Melissa Aronczyk, Harrison wrote that the “GCC has successfully turned the tide on press coverage of global climate change science, effectively countering the eco-catastrophe message and asserting the lack of scientific consensus on global warming.” The groundwork had been laid for the industry’s biggest campaign to date—opposing international efforts to negotiate emissions reductions at Kyoto, in Japan, in December 1997. By then, a consensus had emerged among scientists that human-caused warming was now detectable. But the US public was still showing signs of doubt. As many as 44% of respondents to a Gallup poll believed scientists were divided. Public antipathy made it harder for politicians to fight for action, and America never implemented the agreement reached in Kyoto. It was a major victory for the industry coalition. “I think E Bruce Harrison was proud of the work he did. He knew how central he had been to moving the needle on how companies intervened in the conversation about global warming,” says Aronczyk. |
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{{#if }} We are a small, independent magazine, and our subscribers ensure that our journalists have the resources they need to correct misinformation and expose the right’s assaults on our democracy. Will you support their reporting by donating today? |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor | {{/if}} |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
If media outlets can’t find a better way of delivering bad news, people will tune out. |
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Simply declaring an emergency wouldn’t solve this problem. The Biden administration has long hesitated to back serious policies for a livable planet. |
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