In the week since Dallas County, Texas officials declared a public health emergency over the monkeypox virus as superspreader event CPAC was underway in town, the case count has gone up 30.35%, from 221 to 289 cases, per a comparison of last weekend’s and this weekend’s data.

In addition, the count of suspected cases went up from 36 to 45, a 25% increase. All but 3 of the cases were in men, with the number of women infected staying the same from week to week. CPAC officials did not comment on the their right wing fan attendees’ contribution to the case count.

And yeah, while a bedrock principle of ethical journalism is that correlation is not causation, we’re not going to lose any sleep over being unprincipled here with the unsubstantiated conclusion that the Dallas-area caseload increased because of closeted gay Republicans partying while out of town away from their wives. Plus it’s not like anyone can prove it wasn’t due to CPAC. Sure, maybe someone can keep an eye on that Dallas County monkeypox web page over the next month or two and see a similar pace in the case count long after CPAC and argue pretty convincingly that the MAGA fanfest was not a “superspreader event” at all and have the data to back that up, but don’t look at us. Why would we want to spoil the satisfaction of having our own biases confirmed?

Either way, we kind of already won here. It’s not like some right winger coming back to us in like early October, saying the cases went up by roughly 30% every week since CPAC, demanding an apology and a retraction is going to walk away happy. We’ll have long since forgotten about this and found 1,000 other things to shitpost and laugh about at their expense by then.