98% of cases were in gay or bisexual men. But lately in this country, facts are omitted in new stories for political correctness. Facts that can affect people’s physical or mental health are not being reported - the media has decided to now create the news rather than report it.
I don't know how old you are, but this isn't about political correctness so much as it's about fear of violence. This is because of what happened when people panicked in the 1980s over AIDS, or as it was often referred to at the time, "the Gay Plague." I was in college then, and it was awful; ignorant people would attack people (and families) for being gay &/or for having some evidence of the presence of the disease. Rocks got thrown, even Molotov cocktails a few times. Adults lost jobs, children were hounded out of schools, families were even driven to leave their homes.
Authorities are hesitant to make widespread announcements that the male gay population are at primary risk because they are afraid that lunatics will start attacking gay men over this and that they will be ostracized from society again. It is very unfortunate that that fear of harm is having the effect of not getting the most warnings clearly to the people most at risk, but I understand the official reasoning. Unfortunately, we are now past the point where discretion might help in any way. It's time to start blasting the message out in the gay press, just like then. (The disease that we eventually came to know as AIDS first appeared in the gay community in 1981, but it wasn't until 1986 (in the UK) that government poster campaigns aimed specifically at educating the gay community were done; it took another 3 years before the same kinds of campaigns appeared in the US.)
Like Kaposi's Sarcoma (a skin cancer that often came along with AIDS) Monkeypox is very visible, and when people think they see it they can do nasty things. A couple of weeks ago a woman riding the subway in NYC had a photo taken of her and posted on TikTok speculating that she was out in public with monkeypox, and it circulated around the web so fast that a family member called her about it within minutes. As it happens, she has a skin disease that is not contagious, but that photo will live forever now, and her name is now linked to it, so now she's internet-famous (and not in a good way) for the way that her skin looks.
Conversely, another "viral" photo incident in Spain went another way: this time the photo was taken by a physician who knew it was monkeypox, but when he tried to talk to the man in the photo and to other people who had been in the crowded car about understanding their risk of contagion, he was met with assurances that it would be OK because the disease only affected gays; the government had said so. (Not true, of course; they misunderstood the message.)
See what I mean? The task of public messaging is a minefield no matter how careful one is, and people will react to the message in a lot of unfortunate and unexpected ways. Sure, some people will try to use that for political gain, but that's not the most immediate danger. AIDS killed people wholesale, and Monkeypox isn't as dangerous, but it does often leave behind disfiguring scars, so the fear level is high.
