Most efforts to treat the world’s myr­i­ad ills have fall­en short of inten­tions, nev­er mind expec­ta­tions. To give them a boost­er shot, I sug­gest look­ing to Shake­speare; specif­i­cal­ly, Juliet’s famous lament ‘What’s in a name…”
Think “Mon­key Pox”.

How much atten­tion, effort and mon­ey would the virus gar­ner if it was called by an acronym of its sci­en­tif­ic descrip­tion: “an enveloped dou­ble-strand­ed DNA virus that belongs to the Orthopoxvirus genus of the Poxviri­dae family”.
But say “Mon­key Pox!” and hor­ror movies and scary sci­ence fic­tion spring instant­ly to mind.
The World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (WHO) quick­ly labelled it “a glob­al health emer­gency”. The cyn­ic in me tends to sus­pect that has as much to do with the WHO’s slow response to Covid as it does to the actu­al threat. Mon­key Pox is less con­ta­gious and less like­ly to be dead­ly than Covid, and vac­cines that work to treat it already exist.
At the time of writ­ing: “At least six deaths, out of 25,000 cas­es, have been report­ed in places where the virus was not known to exist before the cur­rent outbreak.”
Just for per­spec­tive, that bare­ly qual­i­fies as a U.S. mass shoot­ing, which by ear­ly July had already claimed more than 22,000 lives this year.
Mon­key Pox prompt­ed three U.S. states to declare emer­gen­cies to boost resources to curb it. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion also declared the out­break an emer­gency. Repub­li­cans criti­sised the response “a dev­as­tat­ing pub­lic health fail­ure”, which leads one to think that con­tain­ing the Covid pan­dem­ic might have been eas­i­er if it had been labeled, say, “Wuhan Bat Pox”.
Grant­ed, it’s not a pox as such, and the nomen­cla­ture risks charges of eth­no-stereo­typ­ing and un-PC-ness. But sure­ly des­per­ate times call for unwoke mea­sures. Tack on “Com­mu­nist” and vac­cine-deniers, anti-maskers and the MAGA crowd would be cheer­ing sci­ence even as they slammed their lock­down doors shut.

                                    SWINGING BOTH WAYS

Care­ful labelling is already being tried out — as a place­bo. The oil giants, which knew they were con­tribut­ing to glob­al warm­ing more than a decade before the pub­lic did, are embrac­ing “green” to con­vince us they care more about stop­ping the Earth turn­ing into a sub­urb of Hell than their revenue.
The world’s fos­sil fuel giants want us to sym­bol­i­cal­ly roll up our sleeves for their mir­a­cle jab, even though what­ev­er it is they’re offer­ing made them near­ly $100-bil­lion in prof­its in the first quar­ter of this year, a fig­ure UN Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Anto­nio Guter­res called “grotesque”.
An Exxon Mobil online advert that smacks of hav­ing been con­jured up by a high-fly­ing PR firm boast­ed that the com­pa­ny has “plans to invest more than $15 bil­lion glob­al­ly in low­er green­house gas emis­sions ini­tia­tives through 2027.”
The adver­tise­ment also boast­ed: “Exxon­Mo­bil is invest­ing more mon­ey to grow oil and gas pro­duc­tion than any oth­er U.S. company.”
When it comes to treat­ing the pox that is cli­mate change, that’s the mod­ern ver­sion of med­i­cine show snake oil. In that vein, Ryan Lance, chief exec­u­tive of Cono­coPhillips, chan­neled mas­ter show­man PT Bar­num, who is cred­it­ed with the phrase “There’s a suck­er born every minute”. With no appar­ent sense of irony or hypocrisy, Lance told New York Times colum­nist Tom Fried­man that the U.S gov­ern­ment should “…resume order­ly and con­sis­tent leas­ing of fed­er­al lands for explo­ration and development…and expe­dite per­mit­ting approval not only for drilling, but also for the pipelines, roads and oth­er infra­struc­ture need­ed to facil­i­tate new oil and liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas production.
That sure­ly all adds up to grounds for labelling the oil giants’ busi­ness mod­el “Oleagi­nous Greed Pox”.

                        THE FINE PRINT SIDE EFFECTS

One of Exxon’s top earn­ers is invest­ments in Guyana, which may find that oil devel­op­ment can be as much a pox as a cure for eco­nom­ic ills. Four decades of oil pro­duc­tion in Ango­la “have cre­at­ed nei­ther pros­per­i­ty nor fis­cal sta­bil­i­ty for Ango­la. At the end of 2020, the nation­al debt stood at approx­i­mate­ly $76 bil­lion. The cred­it rat­ing car­ries a junk bond sta­tus.”
Oil has brought Nige­ria dev­as­tat­ing spills and widen­ing inequal­i­ty. In Equa­to­r­i­al Guinea, the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion lives below the pover­ty line despite the country’s vast oil wealth.
All of those coun­tries and more are vic­tims of what might be called “Klep­toc­ra­cy Pox”.|
Already a world leader in that field, Con­go –which coin­ci­den­tal­ly is where Mon­key Pox was first iden­ti­fied in humans in 1970 — is auc­tion­ing off oil and gas blocks that will harm the world’s most impor­tant goril­la sanc­tu­ary and trop­i­cal peat­lands that store vast amounts of car­bon.  A spokesman said the government’s pri­or­i­ty was to reduce pover­ty and speed eco­nom­ic growth, not “save the plan­et”. That kind of uncon­scious hon­esty smacks of not hir­ing the right PR company.
With apolo­gies to the Bard, the mod­ern man­gling of Mercutio’s dying curse in Romeo and Juli­et sums all that up rather neat­ly: — “A pox ‘o all your hous­es”.

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