Thread by @maolesen

Is monkeypox (mpx) a preamble? First, a little background on the current economic and political front
related to current events is needed.

2/23 The Russian Foreign Ministry states "There should be no doubt - sanctions will be met with a strong response, not necessarily symmetrical, but measured and sensitive for the US side."
tass.com/world/1408937

3/5 Putin described the sanctions placed on Russia in response to the Ukraine invasion as “declaring
war.”
apnews.com/article/russia…

5/13-6/8 This is the WHO list of countries with unusual cases of mpx this year.

Many belong to NATO (yellow) and the highest case counts are all among NATO countries. Finland and Sweden applied to join on 5/18. A few others are a part of the NATO Partnership for Peace (blue). What remains looks like spillover cases.

who.int/emergencies/di…

6/22 Putin has pushed for more trade through BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries,
all notably free of mpx cases.

Who would launch a monkeypox attack intentionally? Someone who is unstable.
newsweek.com/vladimir-putin…

What would be the purpose? The USSR had a massive bioweapons program called Biopreparat. The deputy director defected to the US in 1992. His book has a great deal of information about their program.
foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsul…

“In the 1970s, smallpox was considered so important to our biological arsenal that the Soviet military
command issued an order to maintain an annual stockpile of twenty tons.”

Smallpox vaccines “must be administered before the first symptoms appear. The smallpox weapons we developed sharply reduced this comfort period. When we exposed monkeys to an aerosol of the highly virulent India-1, they contracted smallpox within one to five days.”

“In December 1987, three months after I arrived in Moscow, Kalinin presented me with my first big assignment: I was to supervise plans to create a new smallpox weapon…Considering that outsiders might be suspicious if they saw hundreds of people with the distinctive marks...

...of fresh smallpox inoculations on their arms years after the Soviet Union had discontinued all immunization, we decided, after some deliberation, to issue a directive that workers be inoculated on their buttocks.”

“We calculated that the production line...at Koltsovo was capable of manufacturing between eighty and one hundred tons of smallpox a year. Parallel to this, a group of arrogant young scientists at Vector were developing genetically altered strains of smallpox.”

To put tons of virus into context, “Fewer than five viral particles of smallpox were sufficient to infect 50 percent of the animals exposed to aerosols in our testing labs.” Nobody knows where all the manufactured smallpox went after the breakup of the USSR.

In 2003, I arranged for the hospital I worked at to be one of 15 study sites across the US around vesicular pustular rashes for the CDC.
digitalcommons.centracare.com/cgi/viewconten…

This eventually led to an algorithm to assess smallpox risk. The concern was misdiagnosis leading to delays causing potential further spread before recognition.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18284359/

The early signs and symptoms of monkeypox and smallpox are similar, the main difference is the lymphadenopathy caused by monkeypox. The rash may start as what appears to be small pimples or blisters, further confounding an accurate diagnosis.

The most puzzling piece is that the first case was on 5/6 on 5/20 there were only 93 known cases outside of Africa but Russia had already been vaccinating HCWs with smallpox vaccine, even with no monkeypox cases in the country.

Mass vaccination programs require a lead time to ramp up. How did they know what was developing and how did they implement this so quickly?

kommersant.ru/doc/5358169

What if monkeypox is simply a smokescreen for a smallpox attack later? It would delay identification further accelerating spread. Hopefully the monkeypox problem was naturally occurring, but an unstable person in power is certainly capable of such an attack.