Following the World Health Organization’s declaration that Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is now a global health emergency, one country is dismissing the warning as no big deal.
Russia says it’s “absolutely sure” that Mpox is “not something we need to be afraid of” because the gays required to spread it don’t exist in the country.
“Considering the specifics of how Mpox is spread, I am absolutely sure that in Russia, with its traditional values, this disease, which is an epidemic disease, is not something we need to be afraid of,” said Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian consumer protection watchdog in a video published on Telegram and translated by Politico.
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“For Russia this does not present a danger,” she said, adding with unscientific certainty, “We’re not expecting it to spread. It won’t happen.”
With her reference to “traditional values,” Popova was not so subtly implying that her country’s active purge of LGBTQ+ people would protect Russia from the dangers of a disease most commonly spread among men who have sex with men.
The alert declaring Mpox a clear and present danger to the international community was issued on Wednesday, following data that showed the disease has taken off in Africa, at least doubling infection rates over the last three years.
The outbreak has killed more than 500 people this year, with more than 17,000 suspected cases across Central and East Africa.
The Mpox variant affecting people primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Kenya – Clade I – is more contagious and deadlier than the one affecting Western nations in an outbreak in 2022.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says there are no known cases of Clade I Mpox in the U.S. so far.
“The risk to the general public in the United States from Clade I Mpox circulating in the DRC is very low,” HHS said in a statement, adding they are well-prepared to detect and manage any potential cases.
Russian President Vladimir Putin began his program of erasing LGBTQ+ identity in the country in 2013 with a “gay propaganda” law prohibiting the distribution of “propaganda of non-traditional relationships” among minors. That law was expanded to all age groups in 2022, while the country’s Supreme Court, at Putin’s behest, declared the so-called “International LGBT movement” a terrorist organization the following year.
Popova claimed that there have been three cases of Mpox reported in Russia, all of which she said were detected and contained.
Precisely who was affected by the disease and how it was contracted and spread among the Russians was left unsaid.
The Russian’s assertion that the country would be immune from the disease because of “traditional values” was a reminder of how other authoritarian and theocratic regimes have claimed that gay people don’t exist in service of a political agenda.
In 2007, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously claimed in a question and answer session following a speech at New York’s Columbia University: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
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