And Now We Have Plague Monkeys. Because Why Not?

As if the pandemic and mass deaths and murders and economic devastation and protests and social media fights and oh also MURDER HORNETS weren’t bad enough, 2020 has gifted us with yet another absurdly horrible bit of news: Monkeys in India snatched COVID-19 blood samples from a lab tech and escaped. Because what the world really needs right now is rampant plague monkeys!

To be clear, these were not lab monkeys or captive monkeys. These were wild monkeys hanging around the campus of a medical college in Lucknow, India. The tech was minding his business transporting the blood of four confirmed COVID-19 patients when the monkey attacked, took the blood samples, and fled into a tree. Once the furry little jerks had the high ground in a tree, they proceeded to chew on and throw the samples.

There are a lot of questions here that concern me. Can monkeys get or spread coronavirus? (We don’t know!) Was this the first salvo in the simian war against us (which we deserve to do)? But mainly … are monkeys the geese of India? This reads like a scene from Untilted Goose Game but, you know, with the animal stealing bloodborne pathogens and not a rake.

While we’ve spent most of the pandemic comparing things to Contagion, this new development has people comparing our situation to 28 Days Later, which is honestly a nice change. We all were wondering when the death monkeys would enter the chat, and now here we are.

Honestly, if our lives are turning into a movie, I wish it was … a better movie.

Did anyone else have this on this on there bingo card? Are we honestly even surprised at this point that plague monkeys are just another thing we have to deal with amidst … all this?

Sigh. Whatever. Bring on what’s next. Screaming eels? Fine. Aliens? We did that last month. Discovering Atlantis? Get in line. We live in the weirdest times and whatever comes … I’m sure there will be memes.

(via: CNN, image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Wikimedia Commons )

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Jessica Mason

Jessica Mason (she/her) is a writer based in Portland, Oregon with a focus on fandom, queer representation, and amazing women in film and television. She's a trained lawyer and opera singer as well as a mom and author.

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