‘Pushed out of the emergency department’: a patient’s monkeypox ordeal

One of Australia’s 58 monkeypox patients says he was told to walk home from a Melbourne hospital in the middle of winter while in excruciating pain.

“I don’t know if I was treated like that because I’m a queer man, but I felt Iike I was an HIV person in the ’80s,” Avron Woolf tells Crikey. “To be treated like that while I’m in so much pain was just horrendous.”

“Before I’d even finished packing my things, I had four security guards in the room telling me I needed to leave,” he said.

Austin Hospital has confirmed to Crikey that Woolf was “incorrectly told” the hospital could not arrange transport. 

Woolf says he was discharged after a two-hour stint on Sunday. A four-man security entourage escorted him from the hospital after he resisted doctors’ orders to make his own way home.

Woolf claims he was taken out the back door of the hospital with haste and told to make himself scarce. Feeling unsafe, he called 000. He waited on the kerb shivering in sub-10 degree temperatures for the police to arrive, but decided it was safer inside the emergency department.

He claims he was intercepted by security again, and when the police arrived shortly after they also told him to get out: “I explained that I had monkeypox and needed to find a way home without endangering the public.” He pulled out his phone and filmed the exchange, which is when he claims things turned physical.

“They shoved my head down, a few of them grabbed me. I was kicked, kneed, elbowed in my side and forcibly pushed out of the emergency department doors into the carpark area,” he says.

“I thought they were going to try and take my phone off me so I was trying to send the videos to friends and upload them to Facebook as quickly as I could.”

Victoria Police confirmed in a statement to Crikey that they were called to Austin Hospital about 9.15pm on Sunday after reports a man in the emergency department was causing trouble and refused to leave: “Officers attended and spoke with the man before he was removed from the hospital premises. The man, who was spitting on his hands and rubbing them everywhere, including on the door handles of the divisional van, left the scene a short time later when he was picked up by someone in a vehicle.”

Woolf said he did spit on the police vehicle as he left the scene and wishes he had not: “I had been forced out of the hospital by four police and four security, eight men, and as I walked away surrendered and humiliated, I did spit on the van. I deeply regret that. I was provoked and so angry and it was a last gesture of a fuck you type thing. The police hurt me when they were meant to be there to help me.”

Austin Health said it was sorry for Woolf’s negative experience and confirmed it would contact him directly. The hospital does provide a range of supports to help patients — infectious or otherwise — to get home after an admission, but “in this instance, the patient was incorrectly told we could not arrange non-urgent transport for him to get home after being discharged”.

Crikey did not receive a response to a request for comment from the Victorian health minister before publication.

Clinical adviser at ASHM (Australasian Society of HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health) Associate Professor Edwina Wright says monkeypox is not attracting the same health sector response that COVID-19 has.

“You would hope with a new pandemic people would be eager to ask, ‘What type of virus is this? How does it spread? How can I be careful?’ But a sexual pandemic is different,” Wright says.

“We don’t vilify people with coronavirus; we vilify the virus. Like HIV, the response to monkeypox is to vilify the people rather than virus.”

Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease and can be spread via skin-to-skin contact and respiratory droplets. It is not limited to gay and bisexual men, but the current outbreak’s disproportionate effect on that community is driving the narrative that it is a “gay disease”, says Jonathan Kok, general secretary of HIV-focused not-for-profit PAN (PrEPaccessNOW): “That doesn’t fit any of the health evidence whatsoever.”

Misinformation is being accelerated by haphazard health advice, which Kok says is constantly changing and a minefield to navigate: “Australian government websites have basically grabbed all their content from the WHO, including information that is not necessarily relevant to the current outbreak.”

Woolf is in mandatory isolation for three weeks without work, income or financial support. He struggled to find useful resources online while awaiting a diagnosis so he appealed to health officials to review the data and update it.

“I felt like it was being ignored because the thinking was ‘Oh, it’s just a gay disease’,” he said.

“Nobody said that, but I just got the feeling that this wasn’t important. Nobody contacted me back. I felt quite isolated that our community wasn’t being looked after. If we’re the most at-risk community, why wasn’t there any information telling us how to avoid it?”