How the rhetoric around monkeypox recalls biases in early HIV news coverage
SalonThe emergence of the monkeypox virus in the United States in the past two weeks has stoked fear of a second pandemic and prompted widespread, often fearful news coverage regarding the unfamiliar virus. "If we learned anything from the early years of HIV, it is that when you say that any particular group is the high-risk group you drive people underground, you drive them away from healthcare, and you stigmatize an already underserved and stigmatized group," HIV specialist Dr. Howard Grossman told Salon. "If we learned anything from the early years of HIV, it is that when you say that any particular group is the high-risk group you drive people underground, you drive them away from healthcare, and you stigmatize an already underserved and stigmatized group," HIV specialist Dr. Howard Grossman told Salon, emphasizing that "there's no such thing as a gay disease." "The way it's being talked about is in a way, the direct result of the way we talked about HIV and AIDS, and that was in an appallingly judgmental, dehumanizing way that led to such misery and suffering and still haunts us — haunts every man who has sex with men," Müller described. In the United States, prominent conservative commentator William F. Buckley pushed similar rhetoric, advocating in one New York Times piece to "tattoo gay men's buttocks" and spoke of "quarantining" the HIV-positive, as Dr. Gonsalves, noted.