WHO adviser: "Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease because reasons"

We are ruled by ridiculous and deeply unserious people.

Some random “WHO adviser” and the Canadian Global News want you to know that Monkeypox could spread through sexual contact, but it’s not an STI:

While the world is seeing some cases among that group, anyone can get monkeypox through close contact with an infected person, said Andy Seale, an adviser to the World Health Organization’s Global HIV, Hepatitis and STIs programs.
“It seems clear that this is linked to close contact. This could be through social contact, possibly through sexual contact, which of course is close contact (but) we’re still in the early days of this outbreak so there’s a lot we’re still learning,” said Seale during a virtual question-and-answer event.
“While we’re seeing some cases among men who have sex with men, this is not a gay disease as some people on social media have attempted to label it. Anybody can contract monkeypox through close contact.”
The world also needs to know monkeypox is not a sexually-transmitted infection, Seale added.
“You can get a cough or cold through sexual contact, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sexually-transmitted disease. Typically, you need an exchange of vaginal fluids or semen that has an element of contagion to it to transmit the disease,” he said.
“The difference is that a sexually-transmitted infection is caused by sexual intercourse, anal intercourse, vaginal intercourse, or oral sex.”

This is such stupid sophistry, I feel dumb even replying. Molluscum contagiosum is a classic STD that spreads via close skin contact; human papillomavirus exploits mucous membranes, just like monkeypox. STDs are just infections with a primarily sexual transmission vector, with or without the help of venereal fluids. Like … monkeypox right now.

But, I mean, stigma is bad tho:

As cases began to be identified in men who have sex with men, health officials urged the public not to rush to conclusions as monkeypox is not exclusive to one certain group.
“The community of men who have sex with men has been historically incredibly stigmatized with relation to virus infection, so I want to be very careful to say that that link has not been finalized yet,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, told Global News on Thursday.

The reason this is so infuriating, is that these are the very same irredeemable assholes who spent two years condemning small children to months of social isolation, demanding seasonal nationwide house-arrests, making everyone wear diapers on their faces, restricting most aspects of public life, and forcing unwanted medical interventions upon millions, all because SARS-2 is super dangerous and we need to reduce the spread. Now that monkeypox has found a new transmission vector in gay male sexual practices, the real problem is historical stigmatisation.

Young people who attend parties during the Corona era: Murderers guilty of massacring old people.

Gay men who transmit monkeypox via anal sex: A deeply complex moral problem that calls us all not only to introspection, but also to an awareness of our individual, ongoing complicity in the marginalisation of gay men and other minoritised communities and peoples.

Even if monkeypox spreads to every last sex-with-other-males-having-male on the planet, at no point will anybody, anywhere, ever turn to their beloved and super-effective non-pharmaceutical interventions. There will be no fifteen-day anal sex hiatus to crush the curve. That’s not how this works.