"Brexit could lead to spread of infectious diseases such as super-gonorrhoea, health chief warns" - Evening Standard headline, 2018
The Brexit vote in 2016 broke a lot of people mentally. For the four years from the referendum up until leaving formally the EU in January 2020, and even since then, a lot of people who can best be described as "anally obliterated" have claimed that because of Brexit a lot of Bad Things were going to happen. This was popularly known as Project Fear and included such terrifying tales as an emergency budget, half a million jobs lost, a house price crash, no Mars Bars, a shortage of toilet paper, crops rotting in the fields because of a shortage of cheap Eastern European labour to exploit, rationing, the end of Western civilisation as we know it, and most hilariously, an outbreak of Super Gonorrhoea. All of these turned out to be false despite the efforts of a number of diehards who would hang around supermarkets late at night and take close-ups of empty shelves just before deliveries came in and say this proved them right, or in the case of unharvested crops, a photograph of an unpicked carrot free of context. And then post these on twatter and masturbate furiously as the likes and retwats came in.
Social media. It was a mistake.
Well. Almost all those things turned out to be false.
There was one thing that Project Fear did claim, and which did happen, but you probably haven't heard of it because it came about at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and was one of the various bad news stories that our politico-legal-media complex decided to bury.
I am, of course, referring to the outbreak of Super Gonorrhoea caused as a direct result of Brexit.
1. Origin
First up, a quick lesson in microbiology. Gonorrhoea is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. It can be found in blood, semen, saliva, and vaginal juices. A person infected with it and infect others usually by having unprotected sex. As a bacterial lifeform, however, it evolves quite quickly by dint of reproducing very fast in certain environments. This can include evolved variants which are resistant or even immune to many antibiotics, usually where a course of treatment is not completed or antibiotics are overused generally for other areas. This was in the 2010s a serious concern because at that time no new families of antibiotics had been developed since lipopeptides in the 1980s. For instance, the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria can thus evolve into Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, or MRSA. Colloquially these were known as superbugs in the press.
Gonorrhoea is no difference. Multi-drug resistant variants exist, and for these treatment has to be done with a cocktail of different varieties of antibiotics. In 2020, just after the definitive leaving by the UK from the EU, the usual practice for the NHS was for multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea to administer a mixture of Flucloxacillin, Streptomycin, and Norbapenem. The latter of these, or to give it its full name, nordihydromethylcarbapenem, was a derivative of the carbapenem family of broad-spectrum antibiotics which is often used as a last-line treatment for so-called "superbugs". At the time it was made in a single plant in the French town of Roissy near Paris, and this accounted for over 85 percent of the world's supply. Moreover, it cannot be stockpiled. It is rumoured that the French government pays Novartis, the manufacturer, significant sums to deliberately adulterate supplies with a chemical which will cause it to go off after 3 months to ensure that top prices can be paid, but this is of course merely a rumour.
Upon leaving the EU, the NHS started to have difficulties sourcing this. It turned out that Emmanuel Macron, then President of France, had torn himself away from his huge stash of GILF porn long enough to basically block all supplies of Norbapenem from going to perfidious Albion. This wasn't a problem as multi-drug resistant gonorrhoea is comparatively rare.
Until it wasn't.
2. The Super Spreader Event
In January of 2021, doctors at the St Albans City Hospital found a gentleman with a particularly stubborn case of gonorrhoea. The patient's name was James Cockburn. He admitted that on 7 January 2021, he had been at an orgy at a house in Radlett organised by a business called "The Black Man's Fan Club" which held "parties, specifically organised for females and couples who appreciate the extras that Black guys bring, and of course for the Black guys who enjoy being appreciated." to enjoy themselves in a swinging type of way. This was not the first time that there had been swinging related incidents at that house, as it happened. In 2010 a gentleman called Kenneth Stewart was accused of trying to set his ex on fire at an orgy at the property, and several years later one Edmund Echukwu was found drowned in the swimming pool at the same premises during an orgy. Either way, Mr Cockburn had a dose of the clap and it did not respond to any treatments so a diagnosis of multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea was made and the above course of Norbapenem was prescribed. Only... there was only enough to treat two patients in the whole of the NHS. And given that Mr Cockburn had by his own admission been swinging, bareback, with quite a large number of women, this presented a problem.
"Well of course we took precautions. We were all wearing a mask." - Mr Cockburn when asked why he failed to use a condom.
And indeed they were. Several of the participants in the orgy took advantage of the guidance suggesting masks be worn at indoor social events to obscure their identity and since some of them were married and did not want to alert their spouses that they were playing away from home. Several also refused all contact tracing or even, when telephoned by NHS staff, gave them an earful of abuse about how they were scammers as, sadly, pretending to be COVID-19 contact tracers was a prevalent method for scammers to rob their victims at that time. Needless to say, they went and infected other sexual partners they had. And so it went on. By 20 January 2021 it had mutated and evolved enough to become its own species, which was named Neisseria gonorrhoeae brexitensis.
It should noted that the UK was in lockdown at this time over COVID-19 and the Delta variant. Several of the participants at the orgy were issued with fixed penalty notices for breach of lockdown rules, however, these all mysteriously remained unpaid and disappeared from systems by the summer. It later transpired that the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire Police was at the orgy. Funny, that.
3. Securing the Supply
Well, it came to the attention of the health secretary at the time, Matt Hancock. Who, as it happens, was enjoying his own extra-curricular nookie in the office with an aide in defiance of social distancing guidelines. Needless to say, a crisis meeting was called with the NHS Hertfordshire trust and neighbouring trusts to try and do something about this. The meeting, held over Zoom, was a fractious affair. Within ten minutes one participant referred to clapping for the NHS and the meeting descended into farce. A nursing union representative and staunch Remainer suggested that the NHS should make only token efforts to source a supply of Norbapenem in order to "punish those fucking gammon cunts for trusting that scumbag Farage." A consultant in sexual health suggested that all participants should be arrested and detained without charge until they were dead or clear of the infection because "if it saves one life it's worth it" and that this is the cost of not acting soon enough. A doctor who had formerly been an army surgeon in Afghanistan suggested sending in the SAS to raid the Novartis factory and steal all their stocks. While one person suggested that a pornographic actress and film crew be infected with it, armed with a fictitious clean bill of sexual health, and flown to film an "ultimate gang bang cum swap" grot flick in a variety of European capitals.
Eventually an agreement was made to try to source additional Norbapenem from the factory in France.
Now at this time, the UK was significantly ahead of the rest of Europe in vaccinations against COVID-19. This was mainly thanks to the AstraZeneca vaccine that was developed at Oxford and was just as effective as the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, and did not require storage at -80 degrees Celsius. It was also sold at cost. So a deal was hatched. In exchange for buying a licence to produce Norbapenem in the UK, the UK would export AstraZeneca vaccine to the EU. And indeed, stocks of Norbapenem began to enter the UK. However the Government, which had taken rightful pride in speeding ahead of the rest of Europe in COVID-19 vaccinations, did not want to jeopardise this. So a further, more nefarious, plan was hatched. Once sufficient Norbapenem was in place to treat the remainder of the Black Man's Fan Club, their husbands, their husbands' secretaries, their husbands' secretaries' Tinder matches, and so on, a rumour was floated that in fact, the AstraZeneca vaccine was a dud. A compliant journalist in Germany was bribed to falsely claim from an unnamed source in the German healthcare system that for patients over 60, AstraZeneca was only 8% effective against original, Alpha, and Delta strains of COVID-19, and even associated with fatal cerebral blood clots. In reality, the odds of a blood clot from the AstraZeneca vaccine were merely 1 in 250,000. That way, European governments would be bounced into refusing the vaccine, demand would tank, and the AstraZeneca vaccine would be returned to the UK. and it worked. On 29 January 2022, French president Emmanuel Macron went on record as saying that the AstraZeneca vaccine was "quasi-ineffective" and the German health ministry later that year, when rolling out its vaccine passport system, declared that nobody will be fully vaccinated if they had received AstraZeneca. Observers at the time noted the dissonance between their declarations of the AstraZeneca vaccine being "the clot shot" as one pundit nicknamed it, and their actions of trying to sue the UK in the European Court of Justice for having bought all the AstraZeneca vaccine supply while the EU were still thinking about it and arguing amongst themselves, and even threatening to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to effectively close the border with Northern Ireland until the UK decided to bend the knee. In reality, they knew that the "clot shot" was safe and effective but could not be seen to have allowed the UK to have anything to point to as a positive effect of Brexit.
Of course, the UK Government had one last trick up its sleeve. The licence to produce Norbapenem included trade secrets on its synthesis as a necessary step in manufacturing it under licence. Those secrets were "accidentally" leaked to various university chemistry departments and pharmaceutical companies when "a laptop containing confidential data was accidentally left on the 11.59 from Liverpool Street to Cambridge." And coincidentally, by 2023 Norbapenem will be no longer on patent any more.
4. How did we not know about this?
Well, like all good stories, there is a combination of factors explaining this.
Firstly, the fact that Brexit Super Gonorrhoea arose at an interracial orgy was a major point. Although the casual racism of the 1970s is far behind us, there is still considered something forbidden about this sort of thing even so - though while in the past it used to because of a racialist distaste for miscegenation, now fetishising a person for their race is considered questionable in current year discourse. Swinging is still seen as dubious. The fact that the participants were mostly married to other people who may or may not have known about it was another point. Then there was the fact that the organisers of such an event would not want it publicised that yet another newsworthy happening took place at one of their events and thus would have worked with anyone and everyone to ensure that their business did not make the newspapers. Then there is the fact that being in the middle of the UK's third COVID-19 lockdown and during the initial COVID-19 vaccination drive, as well as just after the Capitol riot in the United States, meant that it was fairly easy to bury bad news.
As for the EU, their being behind Brexit Britain on vaccinations was something they were extremely sensitive about, and their entire case for trying to interfere in the UK's vaccine supply with AstraZeneca's European plants was based on the idea that the UK was effectively hoarding all the COVID-19 vaccines to itself and somehow cheated by being the nimble egg-stealing mammal that was up and eating their lunch before the lumbering EU dinosaur had ever emerged from its swamp. They would not want to be shown as hypocrites when it was they, and specifically France, whose president was amongst the most vociferous of the "jab grabbers" in Europe at that time, who were hoarding a life saving medication themselves. So of course they could be relied upon to keep it quiet. And the journalist who was planted the fake news about the "clot shot" could reliably be kept quiet because it would be professional suicide for him to admit to taking bribes.
The bacterium at the heart of all this, Neisseria gonorrhoeae brexitensis, continues to infect people but with increasing exhortations to practice safe sex it is considered a minor problem. If anything it has arguably spurred development of other antibiotic families, and not before time.
As for Mr Cockburn, the "patient zero" in all this, well, he no longer is a member of The Black Man's Fan Club and reportedly has given up swinging.
And as for this writeup? Well, I'm afraid to say it's all complete bollocks and something I wrote for LieQuest 2022. I bet you weren't expecting that, were you?