Would You Be Willing to Contract Zika if You Got Paid $50 Every Time You Jerked Off?

CNN – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is collecting semen from hundreds of men in the United States in order to figure out how long the dreaded Zika virus lasts in the bodily fluid. The virus can be transmitted sexually, and it’s been known to linger in semen long after a man’s fever, rash and itchy eyes have gone away. If a man has the virus in his semen and has sex with a woman who is pregnant or becomes pregnant, the baby could be born with devastating neurological birth defects. After about two months of recruiting, some 40 men who’ve had Zika have volunteered to donate their semen. The CDC hopes to bring in about 210 more. The men are asked to make about a dozen donations in their homes every other week for six months after their illness, and each time are given a $50 multi-use gift card. A courier picks up the donations, which are then delivered to the CDC’s labs in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

“I’m happy to say patients really have been quite receptive about volunteering their specimens,” said Dr. Paul Mead, the senior epidemiologist at the CDC who is running the study. “They seem to understand the importance of the study.” The CDC plans to recruit 300 men and women in Puerto Rico who’ve had Zika and 1,000 people who live in the same households. “The response has been amazing. People have welcomed strangers to come and get their bodily fluids,” said Dr. Gabriela Paz-Bailey, the investigation’s lead researcher. She said the Puerto Rico study is the largest collection ever of bodily fluids from Zika patients. “Nearly everyone we’ve approached has agreed to participate,” Paz-Bailey said. 

Alright, so I initially misread this article and thought it was $50 for each sample, not $50 for two weeks’ worth of samples. The reality is that that’s about $1200 a year. I wouldn’t spend a week with a bad flu for that kind of cash. But just for the sake of hypotheticals, if the CDC offered you $50 every time you jerked off for the rest of your life, would it be worth catching Zika? Doesn’t sound like a bad source of supplementary income to me. Let’s weigh the pros and cons

Cons

• Itchy eyes, fever, and a rash for a week or two
• If you knock somebody up while you have Zika, your baby is gonna be all sorts of stupid
• You get paid in individual $50 gift cards that end up with weird amounts left on them like $1.17 that you can’t use anywhere. Infuriating

Pros

• Office hours flexible: You don’t even have to come to work, you just need to work to come
• Travel the world: Do your job anywhere. Whether it’s a New York subway station, the back of a police car, a holding cell, or an arraignment courtroom, the setting doesn’t matter. You can make money with a free hand (or some silk boxers) and your imagination
• Dress code: Mega casual. Only requirement is that you don’t wear 3 socks
• Pay scale is up to you: I MADE OVER $100K LAST YEAR WORKING FROM HOME AND YOU CAN TOO JUST GO TO BRAZIL AND STOCK UP ON SOME TUPPERWARE

So what do you think? Personally, I’ve always subscribed to the theory that if you’re good at something, never do it for free. On the less coordinated hand, money does have a way of taking the joy out of everything.

Vote 1 for If I had a nickel for every time I  jerked off, I’d be a millionaire I tell ya

Vote 10 for My kid’s gonna be stupid enough as it is. Can’t be throwing Zika in the mix too