Will We Be Able To Flatten This Curve?

When someone comes to the conclusion that nourishment is something forced upon us by “corporations”, preventing us to wear masks, I’m simply at loss for words.

Recently someone drew my attention to the Twitter account of someone called Eric Feigl-Ding, described as an epidemiologist and health-economist. I have no idea whether this is a real person or a bot, but at least he is a scaremongerer par excellence.

Mr. Feigl-Ding’s latest focus is the monkeypox outbreak, if we can call it an outbreak; a few cases of a relatively harmless disease with low transmissibility mainly within heterogenous groups of people. According to Mr. Feigl-Ding however, this is a deadly serious matter. In a tweet on June 6th, quoting a rather funny CDC recommendation that travellers should use masks on airplanes to protect themselves against monkeypox (which by the way is not even a respiratory disease), he asks the obvious question: “Why the heck was there no big CDC / media advisory on this?”

Now, Mr. Feigl-Ding obviously has made fearmongering his business. If that business is thriving, that’s his right of course. But it is his followers I worry about. One of them has obviously pulled out his pocket calculator and come to the conclusion that the number of monkeypox cases has shot up by some 90,000% over the course of a month. I’ll not even waste time discussing what is wrong with such a calculation for a disease that was detected only a month ago. Another one suggest the CDC is “broken” and it’s because of Donald Trump. But the one who worries me the most is the one with the eating and drinking issue. I’m posting a picture of that reply below, removing the person’s name.

When someone comes to the conclusion that nourishment is something forced upon us by “corporations”, preventing us from wearing masks, I’m simply at loss for words. All I can say is, how many are those people, and will we have room for them in the appropriate institutions? Will we ever be able to flatten this curve?