Breaking the Bias: Reimagining Inclusive Public Health Policies for the Monkeypox (Mpox) Outbreak and Challenging Scapegoating Representations

The Monkeypox (MPOX) outbreak, which manifested in Europe and North America (May 2022), has been a cause for concern due to its potentially serious health consequences. The defining feature of this condition is its visible and superficial nature in that the eruption of contagious pustules all over the skin renders the infection unmistakable and easily recognisable. In other words, it might be argued that MPOX makes the body transparent (Sontag, 2001), for the external observer can see through the patient’s body and promptly come to a diagnosis. Ever since its onset, MPOX, similarly to HIV in the 1980s, has been disproportionately associated with a category of people defined by medical international organisations and the media as gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM), as a higher percentage of infections has been reported among this cohort. Inevitably, the phenomenon has fuelled stigma and discrimination against the LGBTIQ+ community, leading to incidents of violence and ostracism (März et al., 2022). However, it was with the rollout of the vaccine in the UK and the US that MPOX-related social exclusion soared to a dramatic extent, thereby reinforcing the false myth that sexual orientation can determine susceptibility to the virus (Damaso, 2023). In this regard, official accredited sources like the UK NHS website and the GOV UK website recommend that vaccine should be primarily administered to GBMSM “who have multiple partners or participate in sex groups or attend sex-on-premises venues”, thus publicly constructing this category as more vulnerable to contracting the disease. Taking all this into consideration, the dangers of approaching MPOX from such a biased perspective are mentioned as follows: (i) non-publicly LGBTIQ+ individuals may feel discouraged from seeking medical help or vaccination for fear of being outed, thereupon unknowingly spreading the virus and further exacerbating the epidemic; (ii) openly LGBTIQ+ people might be reluctant to apply for vaccination lest they might be stereotyped as sexually promiscuous; (iii) heterosexual individuals infected with MPOX may delay the testing process, diagnosis and treatment because they are not typically identified as a high-risk population. In light of this, the present study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore the discourses underpinning the (mis)representation of MPOX. In particular, the methodology will involve corpus-based approaches (Baker, 2006, 2014; McEnery et al., 2006; McEnery and Hardie, 2012; Baker and McEnery, 2015; Egbert and Baker, 2019; Egbert et al., 2020; Stefanowitsch, 2020) to analyse a large dataset of newspaper articles and institutional documents. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1992, 1995, 2023; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Weiss and Wodak, 2003) will also be adopted to gain a deeper, more qualitative understanding of the data to: (i) unearth the discursive strategies whereby media representations and, above all, official medical guidelines have fed marginalisation and stigma against LGBTIQ+ individuals; (ii) analyse the deleterious impact of prejudiced language use in formal documents and international media coverage on health-seeking behaviour; (iii) call for a more inclusive and evidence-based approach to public health policies and communication so as to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes and prejudices.