The latest World Health Organization data on mpox, the virus now widespread across Africa, suggests that the infection, while clearly unpleasant, is rarely fatal. Although most cases have occurred in developing countries, relatively few have died: 272 out of 124,753 confirmed cases in 128 countries, or 0.2%. For comparison, the last two winters saw more than 18,000 deaths in the UK which were associated with influenza, and in the week ending 13 December 2024 alone there were 524 deaths from flu and 123 from Covid-19.
Yet when two businessmen returned in mid-January from separate work trips to Uganda and saw doctors about isolated spots on their skin, they found themselves engulfed by what one, whom we will call “Anthony”, described as a “living nightmare”. He had just two spots and a mild fever, but having tested positive for mpox at a local Sussex clinic he was detained in a car park by medical staff dressed in hazmat suits. After a short stay at a Brighton hospital, he was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital in London in a five-vehicle convoy, with police cars using their flashing lights and sirens at its head and rear.
Arriving there, Anthony was detained in a bleak, isolated room for almost a week, visited by nurses wearing PPE and three layers of gloves. “I was given a strong impression that I had to obey,” he told me. “I asked what would happen if I decided to discharge myself and go to the pub. They said that was not an option. To me, it felt like overreach.”
The other patient — “Giles” — had just one spot on his hand and no other symptoms. But when a throat swab tested positive, he was told he should throw away his soft furnishings at home unless he had them steam-cleaned. He was also ordered to attend a hospital in Sheffield, many miles from his home, for further testing. Giles’s wife received multiple phone calls telling her not to fulfil work engagements, and was warned that she would otherwise be “endangering the nation’s health”.
Meanwhile, the source of these instructions, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), briefed the media about the positive tests, prompting the Daily Mail to remind readers that last July the WHO declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern” — just as it had done with Covid “a few weeks before the virus ripped across the world”. The two men, the newspaper claimed, had contracted a new and “deadly strain”. But while it is true they were infected with the Clade 1 mpox variant, there is no evidence that this is any more serious or transmissible than Clade 2, the strain it has largely replaced.
The UKHSA is headed by Jenny Harries, the Government’s former deputy chief medical officer, who often spoke in support of lockdowns at televised Downing Street press conferences during the Covid pandemic. She currently manages an annual budget of £400 million — hence, Anthony suggests, “the tens of thousands they must have spent on detaining me and the blue-lamp convoy”.
Given the panic around mpox, the two men’s reluctance to let me publish their names is understandable. Yet Giles showed me the lab records stating that his first Covid-style PCR test had to be run through 30 separate cycles before the virus could be detected — which means that in order to be confirmed as mpox, his miniscule viral load had to be amplified more than a billion times. His second test needed 38 cycles, and was thus amplified by a factor of 274 billion.
Moreover, he had received a smallpox vaccination as a child, which hugely reduces the risk posed by mpox. Yet this, he says, was not taken into account, although “I was almost certainly not contagious.”
Like Anthony, Giles says he was given the impression that the UKHSA had a legal power to order him what to do, but this is not the case. For orders to isolate to be legally binding, the Government would have to pass statutory instruments under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, as it did during the Covid pandemic. These expired in 2022, and have not been renewed.
I asked the UKHSA to comment on the two men’s treatment, and whether it was disproportionate to the level of risk. Dr Will Welfare, its Incident Director, responded: “Clade 1b mpox is currently classified as a high-consequence infectious disease in the UK and can potentially cause severe illness and death. The risk to the UK population remains low. However, as people would expect, we are doing everything we can to prevent it from spreading in the UK. We continue to review the emerging evidence on mpox clade 1b.” He added: “If evidence suggests that it no longer meets this definition, then it would be downgraded.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHaving failed to cow the world’s population with their Covid messaging, the WHO have moved on to their next, utterly inconsequential, disease. I hope Trump declares them to be a terrorist organisation.
Coronavirus Cases:111,820,082Deaths:1,219,487These are the figures just in the USA for the utterly inconsequential disease we called Covid. According to Google results anyway. But then again the internet is well known to be a worldwide conspiracy, run by communist paedophiles and other unamerican perverts – damn them all to hell, I say.
It’s been established that the death rate is about 0.2%. The 1 to 2% number was necessary to justify the economy killing lockdowns and other repressive measures.
Deaths wildly and intentionally overstated to drive health authorities’ power to control everyone’s lives. As eminent epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote in the earliest phases of Covid (which was serious in a small subset of people) there exists no widely used protocol for definitively separating Covid from a number of other respiratory diseases that similarly prey on the elderly and infirm. Many may have died with Covid, far fewer OF Covid. This was always about POWER, not health. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Not buying it anymore.
One can’t fail to notice that as of last month in the UK, influenza is killing four times as many people as COVID.
And for the latter, on the urgings of the WHO, vast swathes of the world’s economy were shut down, educations were wrecked, livelihoods destroyed.
I’m sure none of the people arriving on boats are detained for a week in case they are contagious.
They all have a clean bill of health, being fit, young men.
They are politically correct people. You are not!
Under UK law they are members of a protected group. The people that aren’t are most of the indigenous Anglo-Celtic population.
Ouch, they both should have been burned immediately after the analysis. The health of the nation requires sacrifice!
And their families, and anybody arriving on the same plane. I should coco.
Another disease of mass immigration. And we know the solution to that in the UK, folks: excepting some negative population growth for a few years while getting educated people off sickness benefit and into training or a feasible reintroduction to the Labour force.
“… and in the week ending 13 December 2024 alone there were 524 deaths from flu and 123 from Covid-19.”
While Covid is still the celebrity respiratory disease, shouldn’t this just be 647 deaths from flu?
No, not if 123 of the deaths were from COVID-19.
A case of reverse nominative determinism?
“Dr Will Welfare, its Incident Director,” – Come on that’s his stage name surely?
The rest of the WHO, UKHSA et al is a pantomime anyway
Is this Ebola ?
I wonder how the conversation went between Giles and his wife after he’d brought a little something home for her from his business trip to Brighton.
Surely she and everyone in a ten mile radius are dead?
Naturally.
Given that sodomy is the main method of transmission I wonder what Giles’ wife made of it all?
It’s interesting how everyone here is afraid to ask this obvious question 😉
Covid showed that health tyrants are among the most oppressive authoritarians working in the world today, and almost all are completely beyond the reach of electoral restraint. But it’s all for our own good, of course.
“The UKHSA is headed by Jenny Harries …”
I remember Ms Harries from the UK Covid tyranny era and was unimpressed then. ‘In early March 2020, Harries stated “the virus will not survive very long outside,” and “many outdoor events, particularly, [emphasis mine], are relatively safe,”[20] and warned that it was “not a good idea” for members of the public to wear a mask in which the virus could get trapped, thus increasing the risk of infection.’ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Harries] This is the same female whose organisation later mandated the wearing of face masks and forced us to stop playing golf and other outdoor sports/activities! (Police even arrested at least one young couple for sitting with their young children in their front garden!).
The UK is replete with girl bosses on huge remuneration packages who like to lecture the public and who advance the Woke tyranny. The story of these two infected gentlemen is the latest evidence of this phenomenon.