A Caution Against Monstrosity Language in Virology Communications

The radio advertisement begins with a little boy singing on his way to school. A deep voice interjects and tells him to stop singing. “Go away! Don’t touch me!” yells the boy (Mass Media and Culture, University of Maryland Libraries, 2013). “Yes, yes, I will touch you. And you won’t walk again,” intones the voice. A dramatic instrumental sting, and then the voice introduces itself as “the Crippler . . . a real and living menace, a criminal who may attack the happiness and lives of anyone’s children, including yours.” This radio spot, paid for by the March of Dimes in 1948, used fear of the poliovirus to raise money to care for people with polio and to fund scientific research in search of a vaccine. The previous year, a short film titled In Daily Battle, a promotional film for the March of Dimes, depicted “the Crippler” as a shadowy figure with a crutch who attacked children (In Daily Battle, 1947). The film was soon pulled for being too gruesome.

In these advertisements from the 1940s and in recent science communications, treatment of a virus as a monster is taken for granted. Recent publications on virology research and news feature headlines that perpetuate this treatment:

“The Monster Measles Outbreak in Europe Is a Warning” (Wallace-Wells, 2024).

“Devastation Monster: COVID-19 Evolution from SARS and MERS” (Ahmad et al., 2021).

Virus Hepatitis (World Monster ) (Dwivedi & Singh, 2020).

The Monster Enters: COVID-19, the Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism (Davis, 2020).

“Challenges with mosquito-borne viral diseases: Outbreak of the monsters” (Gautam et al., 2017).

“Viral laryngitis: A mimic and a monster—range, presentation, management” (Dominguez & Simpson, 2015).

“Pandemic influenza virus: tracking a three-headed monster” (Heithoff & Mahan, 2015).

“Antiviral-resistant hepatitis B virus: can we prevent this monster from growing?” (Zoulim et al., 2007).

Whether attention-grabbing or scary, the depiction of viruses as monsters is widespread. However, the perpetuation of this metaphor may elicit more harm than benefit, particularly for people who contract the virus and in a society that increasingly questions scientific authority and is quick to discriminate against the “other.” In this commentary, I will offer a theory for why monstrosity language is so powerful within the fields of virology and public health, consider the implications and ethics of this language, and propose two paths forward for decisions about when the monster metaphor may be useful to deploy.

Monstrosity language persists because it makes for an easily comprehensible comparison to a common cultural trope. By describing viruses as monsters, researchers and physicians make it clear that these microbes are something “other” to “us,” present a menace to humanity, and are difficult to manage or restrain, constantly escaping the grasp of science. In this way, viruses fit the definition of a monster and many of its supporting criteria from the literary and cultural studies field of monster theory. Blake Smith, host of the podcast MonsterTalk, posits that “a monster represents something unusual and possibly unnatural that generates menace, fascination, fear, and excitement. . . it exists within the perceptual realm such that it can be experienced to the extent that it generates narrative from those who encounter it” (Smith, 2021, p. 58). Viruses certainly generate fear and menace for the public, fascination for those who study them, and excitement upon new scientific discoveries.

Virus as monster also generates powerful narratives—stories of sickness, fear-mongering for fundraising, the chase of cures and preventions, and triumphs in virology research. These narratives exist as cultural moments that dominate and fade. From the 1918 flu, to polio epidemics, to the COVID era, we want to quickly put pandemics behind us. The monsters in literature and film in the mid-20th century, like those in the polio fundraising advertisements above, “reflected certain aspects of real-world anxieties [e.g. Communism, the atom bomb, and the sexual revolution] but . . . also urged viewers to forget their anxiety and to trust the military, political, and scientific establishment to chase the monsters away” (Poole, 2018, p. 113). Our monsters in the 21st century seem to be more insidious, difficult, or impossible to distinguish from the human, with great effects on the physical and mental health of the people around them. We are fascinated by the unknowable, the misunderstood, and the perilous, as epitomized by a society-wide true-crime obsession. Thus, the metaphor of the virus as monster, which can only continue to exist by replicating within our bodies, fits this cultural moment. We may not be able to distinguish infection at first glance, but as the monster grows inside, so does the fear of contagion. However, this topic deserves a deeper analysis from a public health and bioethical lens.

The facile comparison between viruses and monsters is not without ethical implications, so the following consideration of these implications should help refine science communications. In the field and practice of public health, scare tactics are common and can be effective. Labels on cartons of cigarettes that warn, “Smoking causes a slow and painful death,” or show grotesque medical imagery appeal to fear to reduce smoking rates (World Health Organization, 2008); fear campaigns motivated portions of the population to stay inside during COVID-19 lockdowns (Harper et al., 2021); and programs like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) have sought for decades to dissuade young people from using drugs and engaging in violent behavior through statistics and personal narratives (Ringwalt et al., 1994). Public health depictions of viruses as monsters may give people a common enemy to fight against, encourage the uptake of effective preventive measures, and stimulate public support for increases in funding for scientific research. Furthermore, the depiction of viruses as monsters both creates and reflects the threat of that virus over time. Polio was much more of a monster in the 1940s than it is in the United States today, and radio ads and films as described above exacerbated the fear of the virus. Since then, the monstrous associations with polio have faded, but this may be part of the problem. When a virus ceases to be a monster, like when polio or measles is no longer as visible or threatening a disease, the fear of it declines and its loss of monstrosity also leads to a loss in the perceived need to fight it. This is reflected in declining polio and measles vaccination rates in the United States. Yet we are reentering an era with a growing threat of polio transmission from regions of the world where it was never eliminated and of measles morbidity for unvaccinated children and pregnant people (Mandavilli, 2024; Mandavilli, 2025). Perhaps a renewed fear of these monstrous viruses would facilitate increased vaccination rates.

Despite their widespread nature, public health fear tactics create a bioethical predicament: how to weigh the harm reduction by the campaign against the potential harms the campaign could inflict. Recent debates about the ethics of public health fear campaigns highlight that such techniques may be ineffective, target victims rather than causes, not address the difficulty of behavioral changes, and may be too upsetting (Chapman, 2018; Stolow et al., 2020). The monster metaphor for viruses is perhaps most complicated by the fact that the fear of viruses could easily translate into stigma against the host. Some viruses are certainly more susceptible to this than others, particularly those that are sexually transmitted and/or associated with marginalized populations, like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), human papillomavirus (HPV), and hepatovirus. A bioethics framework for science communications should discourage the treatment of viruses as monsters given the extant fear of contagion and related fear of sick people and people with long-term virus-derived diseases and disabilities.

Many polio survivors remember how much their communities feared the disease, the quarantine signs that hung on their doors despite public health nurses knowing that isolation was not effective in preventing the transmission of poliovirus, and how the visible remnants of their disease—crutches, braces, an iron long—could conjure alarm long after the infection had passed (Acors, 2024). March of Dimes radio ads and films from the 1940s exacerbated this issue, because to accomplish their fundraising purpose, “the polio-era public health film was forced to explicitly equate the monster with the ‘crippled’ polio victim. One effect was to make the victims of the disease into monsters” (Codr, 2014). Likewise, advocacy groups for people living with HIV fear how stigmatizing language and public health campaigns may negatively affect members of their community who have already contracted the disease. These groups caution, “Words can inspire, empower, and bring us hope. But they can also bully and scare and destroy our sense of self” (Lynn, 2024). Many within that community and public officials have suggested moving away from language like “victims” and “AIDS patient” because it leads to stigma, discrimination, lower testing rates, and lower disclosure rates (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Viruses depicted as monsters will inevitably enter a person—it is how they replicate and perhaps the only way in which they are alive. Stigma against people with diseases and disabilities may therefore be compounded by this fear of virus monsters. Public health professionals, virologists, and science communicators must therefore be careful to distinguish between fear of infection and fear of the infected.

The fear generated by describing viruses as monsters may also stall scientific progress. Phage therapies—which use viruses that attack bacteria—and virus-delivered gene therapies are a new frontier in medicine and might help with emerging problems like antibiotic-resistant bacteria and with the treatment of infectious and genetic diseases (Bulcha et al., 2021; Lin et al., 2017). If people fear viruses as a monolith, this invites beliefs that all viruses must be harmful and may compound misunderstanding of these technologies. The treatment of viruses as monsters may therefore erode distrust in scientific authorities that would promote these “monsters” as beneficial.

Despite these ethical reservations about monstrosity language as a metaphor for viruses, this metaphor may serve valuable societal purposes. Monsters are always culturally bound—what we fear now may be celebrated later, may offer us opportunities to break out of particular social constraints, or may bind us together against a common enemy. In our current cultural context, I see two paths forward for the treatment of viruses as monsters, both ethically defensible: either get rid of this language of monstrous viruses entirely, or use it very carefully and selectively to unite people against specific viruses and in support of vaccination without perpetrating stigma against people who may become or already are infected by the virus. In October, I got my influenza vaccine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and my COVID booster at a retail pharmacy, and I received stickers with each. The flu shot was part of the NIH’s “Foil the Flu” campaign, and the sticker shows a scientist in a white coat fencing with a giant influenza monster. The sticker I got with my COVID shot had an owl with a bandage on its beak and said, “I am brave.” These stickers exemplify the ethical use of the monster metaphor for anti-virus campaigns: COVID and its vaccines are more stigmatized, feared, and doubted than the flu, and so it is better to use values like bravery rather than scare tactics like monsters in promoting vaccination.

The virus as monster is an easy metaphor with a long cultural history. It indicates the dangerous and untamable nature of these microbes and serves to unite people behind science research and vaccination campaigns. However, because viruses infect people, this metaphor runs the risk of unintentionally increasing stigma against people with diseases and disabilities, and it may reduce support for promising new medical technologies that use viral vectors. Virologists, public health professionals, and science communicators should exercise caution in how they describe viruses as monsters, because when the monster inevitably enters, those infected do not become monsters themselves.