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Just as the H1N1 conspiracy theory machine did in 2009, the Ebola conspiracy theory machine goes into overdrive

1918pandemic

Does anyone remember the H1N1 influenza pandemic? As hard as it is to believe, that was five years ago. One thing I remember about the whole thing is just how crazy both the antivaccine movement and conspiracy theorists (but I repeat myself) went over the public health campaigns to vaccinate people against H1N1. It was truly an eye-opener, surpassing even what I expected based on my then five year experience dealing with such cranks. Besides the usual antivaccine paranoia that demonized the vaccine as, alternately, ineffective, full of “toxins,” a mass depopulation plot, and many other equally ridiculous fever dream nonsense, there was the quackery. One I remember quite well was the one where it was claimed that baking soda would cure H1N1. Then there was one of the usual suspects, colloidal silver, being sold as a treatment for H1N1. Then who could forget the story of Desiree Jennings, the young woman who claimed to have developed dystonia from the H1N1 vaccine? Truly, pandemics bring out the crazy, particularly the conspiracy theories, such as the one claiming that the H1N1 pandemic was a socialist plot by President Obama to poison Wall Street executives, which was truly weapons-grade conspiracy mongering stupidity. Oh, wait. That was a joke. It’s so hard to tell sometimes with these things.

Yes, pandemics and epidemics do bring out the worst in people, as far as critical thinking goes. This time around, five years later, it’s Ebola virus disease. To the average person, Ebola is way more scary than H1N1, even though H1N1, given its mode of transmission, had the potential to infect and potentially kill far more people. Now that cases of Ebola virus disease have been reported in the US, the panic has been cranked up to 10 in certain quarters, even though the risk of an epidemic in the US comparable to what is happening in west Africa is minimal. We’ve seen quackery, too, such as homeopaths seriously claiming that they can treat Ebola and quacks advocating high dose vitamin C to “cure” Ebola. The über-quack Mike Adams is selling a “natural biopreparedness” kit to combat Ebola and pandemics, while the FDA is hard-pressed to track down all the quacks, such as hawkers of “essential oils,” who—of course!—also think that their wares can cure Ebola.

Now, given how afraid everyone is of Ebola, not entirely without some justification (it is a horrible disease, after all, and it is spread by contact with blood and bodily fluids), you’d think that everyone could get behind a vaccine against the disease. Given that Ebola is a virus and a successful antiviral treatment tends to be considerably more difficult to develop than a successful antibiotic, a vaccine likely represents the best hope for bringing the current epidemic under control with as little loss of life as possible. Certainly if such a vaccine were to be developed, as it likely will be relatively soon (at least in terms of drug or vaccine development time), given the urgency now that wasn’t there before), you’d think that a vaccine would be welcomed with open arms. And when it comes to most people, at least not antivaccine loons, you’d be right. However…take a look at this video by Barbara Loe Fisher, Grande Dame of the antivaccine movement and founder of the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC):

First, we have a highly cherry-picked timeline designed to make the US and CDC look as incompetent as possible, as Fisher asks a series of “Why?” questions, some semi-reasonable, some pure fear mongering. Then comes the kicker. Near the end of the video, Fisher asks (at the 9:00 mark or so):

And why are experimental Ebola vaccines being fast tracked into human trials and promoted as the final solution rather than ramping up testing and production of the experimental ZPap drug that has already saved the lives of several Ebola-infected Americans?

Hmmm. I wonder what this “ZPapp” drug is. I’ve never heard of it. I wonder if Fisher means ZMapp. Barbara, Barbara, Barbara. How are we supposed take you the least bit seriously if you can’t even get the name of the main experimental drug currently being tested against Ebola right? Then there’s Fisher’s choice of words to describe experimental vaccines: Final solution. One wonders if she could be more obvious in her biases against vaccines. Freudian slip much, Barbara? In any case, contrary to what Fisher claims it isn’t clear whether ZMapp actually did save the lives of those Americans who survived Ebola. It might have. It might not have. We need more data and a clinical trial to tell if ZMapp is as effective as we all hope it is. It might have been that those patients would have recovered anyway with supportive care alone. Indeed, at least one patient that I’ve read about received the drug but died anyway. As for “ramping up production,” it’s not as though it’s as easy as just turning a switch. This drug is a humanized monoclonal antibody (like Avastin and Herceptin, for instance). Making such drugs is difficult, expensive, and can’t easily just be “ramped up” instantly.

Of course, to Fisher, this emphasis on fast tracking an Ebola vaccine can only mean one thing:

A logical conclusion is that some people in industry, the government, and the World Health Organization did not want the Ebola outbreak to be confined to several nations in Africa because that would fail to create a lucrative global market for mandated use of fast tracked Ebola vaccines by every one of the seven billion human beings living on this planet. Will there be an Ebola outbreak in America? Ask the CDC, WHO, DOD, NIH, and Congress. Learn more about Ebola and Ebola vaccines at NVIC.org. It’s your health, your family, your choice.

Notice how it never occurs to Fisher that the best way to stop an outbreak of an infectious disease is through prevention (i.e., a vaccine, in addition to other public health measures designed to slow the spread of the disease). This is particularly true when the disease in question is a viral disease for which an effective drug is difficult to make. In any case, this is a common theme through the latest crop of Ebola conspiracy theories coming from antivaccine loons like Fisher: The claim, implication, or insinuation that the government either created or at least sustained (and took advantage of) the current Ebola outbreak in order to create a market for vaccines for its pharma overlords, although some variants, as we will see, postulate that the reason for starting and sustaining the epidemic is to create a lucrative market for ZMapp, whose early development was—of course!—funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Fisher is not alone in promoting paranoid conspiracy theories. All over Twitter and other social media, there are exchanges like this:

The replies were equally unhinged:

That’s right. According to antivaccinationists, the real reason for the Ebola “feargasm” is to promote a toxic mass vaccination program because…well, just because apparently the government wants to poison us in order to…well, I must confess that I really can’t follow the “logic” of this particular conspiracy theory, such as it is. Such is the nature of the conspiracy theories springing up among antivaccinationists about the latest Ebola outbreak. Why would the government want to kill thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands if the epidemic gets out of control in Africa. They honestly seem to think that the epidemic is a pretext for mass vaccination, rather than proposals for vaccines flowing from the understandable desire of public health officials in the US, Africa, and the rest of the world to stop mass suffering and death. Not surprisingly, the paranoia and conspiracy theories are eerily similar to the ones that sprang up five years ago in response to the H1N1 pandemic and the mass vaccination programs instituted by the US and other nations to try to forestall its worst effects.

In fact, the conspiracy theories get even loonier than that. Remember the whole “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory? It broke on a waiting online world like a massive fart only less than two months ago, back in August. It began when biochemical engineer turned “vaccine expert,” epidemiologist, and, of course, mercury militia member published a truly awful “re-analysis” of a decade-old study (DeStefano et al) that failed to find a correlation between age at MMR vaccination and risk of autism in a case control study. Basically, his “re-analysis” proved Andrew Wakefield wrong in that it found no increased risk of autism attributable to MMR vaccination in all but a very small subgroup in the study, African-American boys, and the numbers for that group were so suspect that virtually everyone with any knowledge of statistics, epidemiology, or experimental design highly doubted they were anything other than an anomaly. Unfortunately, it did spark a ridiculous campaign on the part of the antivaccine fringe, who saw this as “smoking gun proof” of their central conspiracy theory that the CDC covered up The Truth that vaccines cause autism, because, it turns out, a CDC psychologist named William Thompson, who was a co-author on DeStefano et al, had been feeding Brian Hooker information out of some sort of misguided “guilt” over a decade-old scientific disagreement over how to analyze the data that he lost. Naturally, there was no evidence presented that the CDC did anything wrong other than the cherry-picked and highly edited quots and snippets of text from Thompson provided by Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker, the latter of whom had recorded Thompson without his knowledge for months, but that didn’t stop the antivaccine movement from going full mental jacket over this affair.

So, now that they’ve failed to get any traction on the “CDC whistleblower” issue in the mainstream press other than a smackdown by MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow, who made one of the “thinking moms” named Lisa Goes look even more clueless than usual, angering the “media editor” of the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism. How do antivaccinationists explain their failure to get any significant news attention in the mainstream media, despite a whole lot of trying? My explanation is that most reporters know cranks as cranky as this when they see them and, probably more importantly, that Andrew Wakefield is so disgraced and so toxic that his involvement in the story basically killed any opportunity antivaccinationists might have had to get a bottom feeding “mainstream media” outlet to take them seriously. One antivaccinationists’ explanation is that, obviously, Ebola’s the result of a plot to keep the mainstream media from reporting on the “CDC whistleblower” affair:

How is it we suddenly have an Ebola “outbreak” and it is coming to the USA too?
The Ebola outbreak is quite a coincidence – senior CDC scientist Dr Thompson has been talking with Dr Hooker for 10 months about the CDC knowing the MMR vaccine causes autism. The Ebola “problem” was introduced gently to the US public earlier in the year.

Now we have an Ebola “outbreak” in the west just when Hooker’s paper has been published and the admissions about the CDC knowing the MMR vaccine causes Autism issue are breaking news which the mainstream media refuse to report.

And today’s news of a “vaccine” will of course be certain to ensure editors will publish nothing about MMR vaccine causing autism.

Of course to test a new vaccine and a new drug one needs a clinical trial. But people tend not to get Ebola – it has been pretty quiet for a very long time – until now.

And suddenly they ship the sick people off to the USA with all the attendant risks of spreading the disease instead of treating them where they got sick.
Seems a gift for WHO and the CDC but who wrapped it and how long ago?

Because, obviously, the CDC and US government are so nefarious and clever that they foresaw many months ago that in August the whole “CDC whistleblower” thing would blow up, which is why they got an Ebola epidemic in Africa going with enough lead time so that the number of fatalities would be percolating along at the same time, timing it even more ingeniously so that the fear of the disease would be reaching a fever pitch right around the same time those poor, intrepid antivaccinationists were trying to get the attention of the media. Damn, I wish our government functioned so efficiently and with such purpose! Obviously, it doesn’t. But it’s still a hell of a conspiracy theory. Well, not really.

That doesn’t stop the “Vaccine Information Network” from asking Ebola: yet another fake pandemic set up to poison us with drugs and vaccines? The cranks at the VIN do realize that usually when the title of an article is in the form of a question, the answer to that question is, “No,” don’t they? Apparently not, because clearly Jon Rappaport (remember him?) believes that it is. And guess what? He even likens it to H1N1 in this interview:

Q: What is the major psychological factor at work here?
A: Above all else, it is people making an automatic connection between their own frightening image of Ebola and the statement, “So-and-so is sick.”

Q: “Sick” doesn’t automatically = Ebola?
A: That’s right, even when an authority says some person is sick and in the hospital and has Ebola.

Q: Is the Ebola epidemic a fraud, in the same way that Swine Flu was a fraud?
A: In the summer of 2009, the CDC stopped counting cases of Swine Flu in the US.

Q: Why?
A: Because lab tests on samples taken from likely and diagnosed Swine Flu cases showed no presence of the Swine Flu virus or any other kind of flu virus.

Q: So the CDC was caught with its pants down.
A: Around its ankles. It was claiming tens of thousands of Americans had Swine Flu, when that wasn’t the case at all. So why should we believe them now, when they say, “The patient was tested and he has Ebola.” The CDC is Fraud Central.

Q: Where is the fraud now, when it comes to counting Ebola cases and labeling people with the Ebola diagnosis?
A: The diagnostic tests being run on patients—the antibody and PCR tests are most frequently used—are utterly unreliable and useless.

Q: Therefore, many, many people could be labeled “Ebola,” when that is not the case at all?
A: Correct.

Q: But people are sick and dying.
A: People are always sick and dying. You can find them anywhere you look. That doesn’t mean they’re Ebola cases.

Q: In other words, medical authorities can place a kind of theoretical grid over sick and dying people and reinterpret them as “Ebola.”
A: Exactly. The map can be drawn in any number of ways.

Got that? Back in 2009, apparently, it wasn’t H1N1 that was sickening people, and now in 2014 it’s not Ebola that’s killing people in West Africa and infected a handful of people in the US. What is the cause? According to Rappaport, it’s not the virus. Basically, it’s protein-calorie malnutrition, hunger, starvation, extreme poverty, contaminated water supplies, overall lack of basic sanitation, a decade of horrific war, toxic medical drugs, prior toxic vaccine campaigns, and the like that cause destruction of immune systems, leading to:

Then, any germ that sweeps through the population, a germ that would ordinarily be defeated, instead kills many people. Why? Because the immune system is too weak to respond. With healthy and strong immune systems, the germs would have no significant effect.

This is, of course, utter BS. Rappaport, as usual, argues by assertion and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s amazing how constant the forms of infectious disease denialism are. Just like HIV/AIDS denialism blamed “lifestyle” and immune compromise due to drugs, anal sex, and “lifestyle,” claiming that AIDS is not caused by HIV, Ebola virus denialism claim that what is being diagnosed as Ebola is in fact not due to Ebola but to “toxins,” malnutrition, and, of course, vaccines. Of course. Yes, to Rappaport, the whole thing is a plot to drive demand for products made by big pharma, such as vaccines. Naturally, as with all good disease conspiracies, Rappaport drives it with claims that the case numbers are being “manipulated,” labeling the Ebola outbreak as a “hoax,” claims that the tests are “unreliable” (they’re not; while it’s true that early in the course of symptomatic Ebola infection the disease resembles a lot of other viral diseases, there are a number of sensitive and accurate diagnostic tests, including PCR, ELISA, and, ultimately, virus isolation); and claims from the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, from whom Rappaport cites a 1996 quote claiming that “quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” It’s not; I’ve been doing highly accurate quantitative real time PCR in my lab for 14 years now, and it’s a routine technique in molecular biology labs. In 1996, reliable quantitative PCR hadn’t been perfected yet, but today it’s a routine, every day test.

Of course, it’s not just the CDC, at least not according to Yoichi Shimatsu, but it’s apparently the UN, too. Yep, according to the Shimatsu, Ebola outbreaks coincided with vaccination campaigns by World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN children’s agency UNICEF. To others, however, the Ebola outbreak is not so much a plot to enrich big pharma but rather US-sponsored bioterror. At least, so sayeth someone calling himself Prof. Jason Kissner. Kissner, it turns out, is a criminologist and a birther, but with a twist. While he accepts that President Obama was born in Hawaii, but claims that he holds dual citizenship as an Indonesian. In fact, Kissner is all over the conspiracy sites, and his arguments about Ebola are no more coherent than his arguments about the President’s birth certificate. He also thinks that the “the racial ‘dialogue we’ve been hectored about for several decades is in reality no “dialogue” at all; it is a monologue imposed by the powerful in order to decimate the values and individuality of the powerless.” After worrying about whether the virus responsible for the current outbreak might have gone airborne, he goes on to invent a conspiracy theory in which the current outbreak is due to a bioengineered variant of Ebola that’s more contagious than previous strains. He bases this almost entirely on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine from April about the emergence of the Zaire strain of Ebola in Guinea, which notes that the Guinea strain in West Africa is distinct:

According to the initial epidemiologic investigation, the suspected first case of the outbreak was a 2-year-old child who died in Meliandou in Guéckédou prefecture on December 6, 2013 (Figure 2). A second investigation confirmed the origin of the outbreak in Meliandou but revealed a somewhat different timing of the early events (including the death of Patient S1 at the end of December and the deaths of Patients S2, S3, and S4 in January). Patient S14, a health care worker from Guéckédou with suspected disease, seems to have triggered the spread of the virus to Macenta, Nzérékoré, and Kissidougou in February 2014. As the virus spread, 13 of the confirmed cases could be linked to four clusters: the Baladou district of Guéckédou, the Farako district of Guéckédou, Macenta, and Kissidougou. Eventually, all clusters were linked with several deaths in the villages of Meliandou and Dawa between December 2013 and March 2014.

In a nutshell, both The Shimatsu conspiracy theory and Kissner’s conspiracy theory rely on an appeal to incredulity. Just because Kissner and Shiamatsu can’t believe that Ebola could remain dormant for years and then reemerge to cause this outbreak, to them something else must be going on. For instance, Shimatsu writes:

The mystery at the heart of the ebola outbreak is how the 1995 Zaire (ZEBOV) strain, which originated in Central Africa some 4,000 km to the east in Congolese (Zairean) provinces of Central Africa, managed to suddenly resurface now a decade later in Guinea, West Africa.

Kissner’s contribution to this argument from incredulity is that he can’t believe that the distinct strain of Ebola could have arisen naturally and then found its way from Zaire all the way to West Africa without human intervention. I bet you can guess what that intervention is:

And, we seem to have a single introduction of the Guinea (West African) Ebola variant into the human population. Thus, we seem not to have, for example, something along the lines of multiple bites of humans by supposedly Guinea variant Ebola infected fruit bats.

Finally, the Western Africa Ebola outbreak does not appear to be traceable to Central Africa or anywhere else, and so we still do not know how Ebola got to West Africa.

To Kissner, this of course means that it must have been US bioterrorism that introduced this “new” Ebola strain into the human population in Guinea in order to…what? Why? To Kissner, it’s all about the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp, which was only identified as a potential Ebola drug candidate in January 2014:

Does “ZMapp was first identified as a drug candidate in January 2014” mean that ZMappwas designed from the ground up, pretty much when the outbreak began, with the specific purpose of treating the Guinea Ebola variant (see above for timing of the outbreak)? Or, does it mean that ZMapp was repurposed in some way to grapple with the Guinea variant? Or does it perhaps mean something else entirely?

That “something else entirely” to Kissner is that the makers of ZMapp knew about the new Guinea variant and designed ZMapp to combat it. Apparently Kissner has never heard of crossreactivity of antibodies. Or perhaps he has but just doesn’t believe it:

Perhaps Mapp had been in the process of designing ZMapp so that it could successfully attack already extant Ebola variants, and whatever properties made it effective against those already extant variants also transferred to the novel Guinea variant?

Maybe.

But if that is so, ZMapp should prove successful against variants of Ebola other than the Guinea variant. Will it?

If it doesn’t prove successful against variants of Ebola other than the Guinea variant, I do not see how one can logically avoid the conclusion that the West African rooted, Guinea variant of Ebola amounts to U.S. government linked bioterror.

Unless, of course, one is willing to invoke what amounts to a miraculous stroke of luck consisting in the design of a solution that successfully attacks something that’s never been seen before and was not anticipated—even though the solution fails against related versions of the same problem.

In closing, please note that the U.S. act of bioterror explanation economically accounts for all three U.S. lies discussed in the article. It explains why the U.S. government is lying about the airborne status of Ebola, why the U.S. government/MSM hybrid is in no hurry to disclose the geographical and virological novelties of the Guinea variant, and, finally, why the U.S. government, out of one side of its mouth, wants to act like its “miracle experimental drug” had to be pried out of its greedy and comprehensive regulatory hands.

That’s one hell of a plot, isn’t it? Of course, ZMapp has been under development at least since 2012 and the antibody cocktail against Ebola virus used went through at least three distinct iterations, its latest composition having been arrived at in early 2014 based on testing in rhesus macaque primates. I suppose that means that those nefarious Department of Defense funders who helped fund the drug and Leaf Biopharmaceutical Inc., the company currently developing ZMapp, must have planned even further ahead than even Kissner could know. Or maybe there’s just good crossreactivity of this antibody cocktail to multiple strains of Ebola.

Shimatsu disagrees. Although his logical fallacy is also an appeal to personal incredulity, unlike Kissner, he thinks it’s all due to the UN vaccine programs:

The reason for suspecting a vaccine campaign rather than an individual carrier is due to the fact that the ebola contagion did not start at a single geographic center and then spread outward along the roads. Instead. simultaneous outbreaks of multiple cases occurred in widely separated parts of rural Guinea, indicating a highly organized effort to infect residents in different locations in the same time-frame.

But how and why? Shimatsu has a ready answer:

Repeated dosages of potent toxins on populations with poor health, which no public-health agency in the Western world dares attempt inside its own borders, can have harmful side effects, especially on children. The casualties of vaccination have gone unreported by the media and buried under official cover-ups. Even worse, vaccine programs could well have been used to conceal human testing of antibodies that originated in biological warfare labs for the purpose of mass murder of entire nations.

Yes, according to Shimatsu, the MSF, UNICEF, WHO, CDC, NIH, USAMRIID and, as Shimatsu puts it, the “rest of the alphabet soup of the hypocritical oafs of pharmaco-witchcraft” are all just that evil.

Throughout history, infectious disease has brought out the best and worst in humanity. The best, like Doctors Without Borders, go selflessly straight into the hearts of epidemics in order to treat the ill, try to prevent further spread of the disease, and alleviate suffering wherever they can. The worst, like antivaccinationists and conspiracy theorists like Kissner and Shimatsu, try to deny the cause of the disease in favor of conspiracy theories that demonize the very organizations trying to help its victims and companies trying to make vaccines to prevent it and drugs to treat it.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

145 replies on “Just as the H1N1 conspiracy theory machine did in 2009, the Ebola conspiracy theory machine goes into overdrive”

…..holy crap.

There’s waaay to much herp in their derp. I don’t think there’s enough tinfoil to cover that amount of B.S.

That BLF can’t get ZMAPP right doesn’t surprise me, nor do the usual quack calls for Vitamin C, colloidal silver, etc as curealls… but I can’t fathom that level of pure, unadulterated paranoia.

Kissner: “And, we seem to have a single introduction of the Guinea (West African) Ebola variant into the human population. Thus, we seem not to have, for example, something along the lines of multiple bites of humans by supposedly Guinea variant Ebola infected fruit bats.”

Shimatsu: “the ebola contagion did not start at a single geographic center and then spread outward along the roads. Instead. simultaneous outbreaks of multiple cases occurred in widely separated parts of rural Guinea”

It seems like this is a question of fact. Either there was a single initial case or there were multiple initial cases. But I suppose conspiracy theorists needn’t bother with facts.

Isn’t there some way to warn readers that they’re about to scroll past an image of Barbara Loe Fisher?

The sudden nausea could be incapacitating.

[…] so that we can prepare in the eventuality that we have to do more than we're doing currently. Just like for H1N1, the Ebola conspiracy theory machine goes into overdrive – Respectful Insol… Support 81 Reply With […]

At some point, hopefully not in my lifetime, there is going to be a serious pandemic. If we are able to develop an effective vaccine in time it will be a case of evolution in action for the vaccine deniers. Of course, if there is no vaccine, it will still be evolution in action, but only those with a naturally occurring immunity will win the evolutionary lottery.

@MI – it is only a matter of time. There have been a series of troubling outbreaks in Asia and Australia that show diseases beginning to make the jump from animals to humans….luckily, these outbreaks (mostly linked to Bats) have been limited in scope, but also with very high mortality rates.

Unfortunately, these conspiracy nuts will never be satisfied or understand even basic biology, epidemiology or all of the other research into this area of disease emergence and spread.

People don’t seem to realize that HIV emerged in just the past 50 years and has killed more than 40 million people…..and the next pandemic disease could be right around the corner.

Perhaps dreaming** up conspiracy theories about Ebola will distract anti-vaxxers away from new studies like this:

K.Chawarska et al at Yale Medical School found that 20% of younger siblings of children diagnosed with autism would be diagnosed themselves as well by age 3. 57% exhibit symptoms by 18 months whilst others appear to be relatively asymptomatic. The study looked at communication, social indicators and repetition. A small percent displayed eye contact but had other symptoms. Thus different combinations emerge at different ages.

And can account for the tales we read from sources like the usually suspected ones. Also there may be a pool of un/ under vaccinated younger siblings with autism. ( see Stagliano and possibly Jameson)

** and dreaming is free.

Because, obviously, the CDC and US government are so nefarious and clever that they foresaw many months ago that in August the whole “CDC whistleblower” thing would blow up, which is why they got an Ebola epidemic in Africa going with enough lead time so that the number of fatalities would be percolating along at the same time, timing it even more ingeniously so that the fear of the disease would be reaching a fever pitch right around the same time those poor, intrepid antivaccinationists were trying to get the attention of the media.

Yes, it is striking that many conspiracy theories require either an extremely specific degree of foresight, or access to a time machine, on the part of the alleged perpetrators.

Ebola has been known since the 1970s, and its close relative Marburg since the 1960s, although both were probably around a few decades before that. (Relative to Lawrence’s point about HIV, I understand its origins have recently been traced back to the 1920s, although the disease it causes was not identified until the early 1980s.) What was different about this Ebola outbreak compared to earlier outbreaks is that this one managed to reach a major population center, and spread from there. But it can be dealt with, as Nigeria and Senegal are demonstrating. Is the US health system at least as good as what Nigeria and Senegal have? I’d like to think so–we do have more resources available–but that idea will be put to the test here. Notably, the three known cases so far of people contracting Ebola outside Africa have been the two in Texas, where ideological opposition to government spending is exceptionally strong, and one in Spain, where cuts imposed due to austerity measures resulting from the 2008 financial crisis have arguably reduced their ability to deal with viral infections like Ebola. These policies may well prove penny-wise, pound-foolish.

If anybody is starting to feel a little queasy/nervous everytime a family member or aquaintance pops by with some yummy Cracker Barrel left overs, or maybe just a little pendantic for the hell of it, then they might encourage their kids to do this preparation as an elected chemistry lab exersize…

Two teams of chemists are now burnishing silver’s status. They have independently developed methods to make robust silver nanoparticles on a large scale — and have worked out what makes them stable.

Bigioni’s recipe mixes one of the cheapest silver salts — silver nitrate — with other inexpensive reagents in water and ethanol. The simple, reliable method gives yields higher than 95%, … “It’s very different from any other nanoparticle synthesis I’ve ever encountered,” says Bigioni. “This is something a high-school student could do.” The procedure is described this week in Nature.

Bigioni and Zheng’s procedures made only particles with 44 metal atoms, no more or less … it would also make the properties and quality of the particles much more predictable, easing the path to regulatory approval for any biomedical uses of the particles, such as delivering antibiotic silver atoms to a microbe.

http://nature.com/news/easy-route-to-stable-silver-nanoparticles-1.13681

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7467/full/nature12523.html

Besides, a toddler’s security blanket doesn’t usually cause any harm or make him turn blue unless he eats enough of it or it’s rayon/dacron/nylon and he played muslim terrorist with it a little too tight for too long.

@Eric – prior to the current outbreak, researchers in Africa have been tracking the spread of Ebola through the primate population – primarily gorillas, where it has been devastating & cut a wide swath through the regional groups….it was only a matter of time before Ebola got a foothold in a larger human population (i.e. moved from rural to urban centers) – not to mention the fallout of all of the other diseases that are now basically untreated because of the resources all being dedicated to Ebola control and containment right now.

Again, the anti-vax cranks and conspiracy nuts will look at any and all available evidence only through their own “conspiracy-colored glasses” and never really believe that this is anything more than a man-made outbreak or that governments are actively encouraging the spread for some nefarious (though usually unstated) purpose.

As to the current challenges we are facing here – in the treatment of Ebola patients in our own hospitals – this is really the first time the vast majority of our medical professionals have had direct contact with a pathogen like this. I would expect, even in ideal circumstances, that mistakes will be made or whatever protocols are issued might not cover all situations that the nurses / doctors are faced with.

The CDC & local hospitals need to do a better job – but given the circumstances they aren’t doing too badly either.

“How is it we suddenly have an Ebola “outbreak” and it is coming to the USA too?
The Ebola outbreak is quite a coincidence – senior CDC scientist Dr Thompson has been talking with Dr Hooker for 10 months about the CDC knowing the MMR vaccine causes autism. The Ebola “problem” was introduced gently to the US public earlier in the year.”

The Ebola “problem” has been going on a lot longer than that, but the US media couldn’t be bothered as long as it seemed like it was just gonna do the usual thing of wiping out a few African villages. I don’t think antivaxxers are generally racist, but thigns like this certainly reveal just how little interest they genuinely have in events beyond the borders of the US.

@Calli – they are firm believers in “First World Problems” as opposed to caring about what happens to kids in Africa or Asia….unless, of course, they can blame whatever is going on, on vaccines – then they care (sort of).

Although I’m not a medical person, I know about Ebola and Marburg for well over 20 years via general news reports and through education relevant to employment concerning hiv+ people because of the origins/ emergence of all of these viruses.

On the vaccine front, a group called Children of God for Life has gotten huffy because of “fast tracking” of Ebola vaccine that is using “aborted fetal cells.”

Don’t forget what commenters at Natural News “know” is true: If you get the Ebola vaccine, you will get Ebola!

Rappaport (and Adams et al): “With healthy and strong immune systems, the germs would have no significant effect. ” My knee-jerk reaction is always: Prove it. Get yourselves over to the hospital and help take care of the Ebola patients.

@lsm – if they are so sure of their “immunity” and ability to fight off disease, then they are doing a public disservice by not volunteering to take care of those who are sick…..

It’s deeply offensive that anyone would think that “they” would engineer a pandemic, killing thousands of people and leaving thousands of children as orphans, in order to “cover up” any sort of bureaucratic scandal. There are a hundred things wrong with the current Ebola outbreak and the international response and lack of preparedness for it, but vaccine cover up ain’t one of them.

@Tim

The problem with impregnanted textiles – the release of the NPs during washing – and they do get released – which leaves the antibacterial/antimicrobial properties of the blanket in question after the first wash (and will release the NPs to the aquatic environment).

Also, there is limited data to support ingestion of silver for its antibacterial/antimicrobial properties. There’s also a lack of data for the excretion of AgNPs from the body.

We know that the size of the NP is inversely proportional to its uptake – meaning the smaller particles are taken up more efficiently. They are small enough to be taken up into the body’s cells by simple diffusion, and also by active transport (in place of Na+ cations).

Once the NPs enter the cell, they produce ROS which normally leads to apoptosis. There’s evidence of uptake in the liver, kidneys, heart, lungs and brain. Nanosilver also gives a positive modified AMES test, and is toxic to germ cell lines.

Darwy,

The test serves as a quick and convenient assay to estimate the carcinogenic potential of a compound because standard carcinogen assays on mice and rats are time-consuming (taking two to three years to complete) and expensive. However, false-positives and false-negatives are known.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_test

If the ‘blue man group’ starts developing tumors I’d still probably suspect Corexit-tainted army {more than two} things first…

It is too much to hope that the vaccines would be highly efficient and allow us enough leeway in regards to herd immunity to accommodate all those uncomfortable with taking it.

False positives and false-negatives are known for a number of tests.

Given that there’s positive modified AMES test, mouse micronucleus (MN) assay, Pig-a assay and Comet assay, cytochalasin B-blocked micronucleus assay, all which indicate genotixicity…

I think there’s enough evidence there that ingesting nanosilver is a bad idea.

Thus, we seem not to have, for example, something along the lines of multiple bites of humans by supposedly Guinea variant Ebola infected fruit bats.

I’m pretty sure that attacks by flying frugivores could have just been ruled out a priori.

The Rowan Farrow piece was interesting. I am disheartened by the dusting off of the “vaccines debate” meme (or to keep it current, ‘#vaccinesdebate’), though.

The mystery at the heart of the ebola outbreak is how the 1995 Zaire (ZEBOV) strain, which originated in Central Africa some 4,000 km to the east in Congolese (Zairean) provinces of Central Africa, managed to suddenly resurface now a decade later in Guinea, West Africa.

Yah, that’s a stumper, Shimatsu.

Oh, wait.

Denice @15: There is even a book on the subject, The Hot Zone, which was aimed at a popular audience and published in the early 1990s (or maybe as early as 1989–I don’t have my copy handy). I bought my copy at a secondhand bookstore in either 1995 or 1996, and have read it at least twice. So that information has been available to civilians for more than 20 years.

The point of The Hot Zone is that this is not the first time we have seen Ebola infections in the United States. The book is centered on an outbreak that occurred in an imported monkey warehouse in Reston, VA, in the late 1980s. The Reston variant of Ebola was believed at the time to have been capable of airborne propagation, though I understand this conclusion is now disputed. One or two human employees at this warehouse actually became infected with Ebola Reston. Luckily for everyone involved, the mutations which distinguish the Reston strain from the other two strains of Ebola that were known at the time rendered the Reston strain incapable of causing anything worse than a cold in humans, though it was fatal to all of the monkeys involved.

The variant responsible for the current outbreak is, unfortunately, “real” Ebola and not Reston. But it’s not even true that the two nurses in Dallas were the first to contract Ebola in the United States.

The variant responsible for the current outbreak is, unfortunately, “real” Ebola and not Reston. But it’s not even true that the two nurses in Dallas were the first to contract Ebola in the United States.

For all intents and purposes, it is true. Reston virus (from the Philippines) is in the genus, but it’s not EBOV.

@AllieP #21: re “they” coordinate–

All that, of course, assumes massively more competence in a group of highly disparate organizations’ ability to coordinate things than even approaches reality. The US military has come a long ways in interoperability amongst the services and even with some NGOs, but they at least have the major incentive and opportunity to practice. Even still there are multiple areas to screw that sort of thing up in the most mundane of matters like comms, terminology, and the like. And these are groups with similar structures and are English speaking…the complexity is boggling even at the level of things like tsunami relief! Conspiracy indeed. It’s a combo of Murphy’s law on steroids plus “the best laid plans of mice and men” all tumbled together with a bunch of other cats and dogs. It’s ludicrous, it is–couldn’t happen even if “they” wanted it to.

Take 4 minutes and hear what Shep Smith of Fox News said yesterday http://mashable.com/2014/10/15/fox-news-shep-smith-ebola/ . And read the following as well: The tag ‪#‎FactsNotFear‬ is being used by many media sites to promote this fact filled article. http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/infographic.pdf Ebola: #FactsNotFear http://on.wkyc.com/1xQ3cOj How quickly Ebola spreads compared to other diseases http://wapo.st/ebola-spread via Post Graphics

Yeah I work in PH and it has been non-stop Ebola panic and fighting to get some kind of guidelines out all week. I do find it personally offensive when some of these nuts make the case that essentially the entire field of PH is complicit in murdering/maiming small children. The depth of the conspiracy theories is shocking and to whoever upthread (sorry but I am headed out door and don’t want to look) a nod towards your comment about a time machine. Either a breathtaking number of people have to be ‘in on it’ or the government has access to a true precognitive (and if that was the case why don’t they just get the PowerBall numbers and retire rich) or a time machine. The fear surrounding this illness makes it difficult to have reason penetrate the shell. Hopefully TX will have its act together and we won’t have any more cases.

After careful thought, if something happened and – LO! – there were an approved Ebola vaccine available tomorrow, I would not sign up for it. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be available to me since I don’t live in an area where Ebola is endemic, I am not planning to travel to such an area, and I don’t work in a field where I am likely to come into contact with someone who is sick with Ebola. My expectation would be that at first the supplies would be reserved for the people in those 3 categories.

After that, we’d see.

LW –

Either there was a single initial case or there were multiple initial cases.

But what if it’s quantum?

This is a test – I tried posting with the phrase “it depends on whether the wave function has collapsed” and the message vanished mysteriously (much like my door knocker). I thought this was a better punch line than “quantum”.

from one of Colorado’s newly registered not-a-doctor’s, “ummm…ebola is a VIRUS! Why aren’t hospitals willing to use a well-proven anti-viral just because it is a vitamin and not a drug??? The is plenty of research out there about IVC being used to cure polio in the 1940’s…very frustrating when there is an obvious treatment that gets ignored because it is not a new expensive drug…ugggh!”

This video was posted on a thread over on Mothering.com called “Ebola hoax busted”

They seem to think this is pretty convincing evidence.

And the latest news picture that shows a man with a clip board not in any kind of protective gear helping transport one of the nurses to an airplane is also considered further evidence that this whole this is a scam and hoax by the anti-vaccine nuts on Mothering.

If we’re going Quantum, Mephistopheles O’Brien (and I’d rather not right now), then —

Road construction ahead…Get in both lanes

matters like comms, terminology, and the like. …

Well said, brewandferment #31. Of course, I read it as ‘commas’ and thought you a grammar nazi what can’t see the meaning for the words… but only for a few cycles *grins*

^^ I’m sure the dude in that picture did not have breast cancer… he’s a liar….

Kiiri — me too. Some idiot posted a Facebook rumor this morning that we had an active Ebola case in our jurisdiction and we spent nearly the entire day doing rumor control.

The only silver lining to this cloud is that I racked up five hours of overtime.

This video was posted on a thread over on Mothering.com called “Ebola hoax busted”

This one’s good:

“Once upon a time (no wait, that is pretty much every day) a skeptic site says something vile – like, I don’t know, ‘anti-vaxxers masturbate over dead babies.’ That, for the record, is an actual quote.”

The only other relevant time that G—le has heard about this is from the same commenter. Even better, though, is that Beckybird actually links to the “We’ve Got to Save ‘Dr.’ Megan by Posting All of Her Personal Information” mother ship, Jimstonefreelance.

@Narad,

What is the “We’ve Got to Save ‘Dr.’ Megan by Posting All of Her Personal Information” link you’re talking about?

Blimey. The amount of contortion these conspiracy peeps get themselves into is worthy of a Cirque du Soleil act.

What is the “We’ve Got to Save ‘Dr.’ Megan by Posting All of Her Personal Information” link you’re talking about?

If you insist. The budgetcamerareview-dot-com thread has been scrubbed (cf. this), but it unfolds here. The Jim Stone cranks come to the fore some 20+ pages in.

You know there’s panic and conspiracy theories abounding in the US when they make the goddamned news in another country.

I was treated to about 20 minutes of discussion in the local news here about the widespread panic, etc in the US. Then they discussed one of the Doctors without Borders who was currently in isolation in a negative pressure room at the hospital about 10 minutes from me, with Ebola like symptoms.

(He tested negative)

Annie, if you’re looking for the tl;dr version of the ‘Saving “Dr.” Megan’ affair, it’s encapsulated here.

I was talking to someone only last night whose daughter’s best friend is antivax and also thinks ebola is a conspiracy. The depressing part is they have a young baby and they’re traveling to Nigeria soon. While the odds of getting ebola are probably very slight, there are other diseases like yellow fever, typhoid etc. which are far more common. This aggressive stupidity and willful endangerment of their child really angers me.

@Adam: And have these people checked entry requirements for the country or countries they plan to visit? Most tropical countries require proof of vaccination against yellow fever for travelers coming via countries where yellow fever is endemic, and some require it of all travelers. The only exceptions are people who can document, with a doctor’s note (translated into the local language if necessary), a medical contraindication to the vaccine.

Many of these countries have recent experience with vaccine preventable diseases, so the sort of anti-vax stuff we see in the US and Europe will not carry any weight in most of the Third World.

I just saw a segment on Ebola scare nonsense on the Rachel Maddow Show: Republican representatives and Fox News reporters are worried about terrorists with Ebola crossing the country’s porous borders. A URL squatter is trying to sell ‘ebola.com’ to the highest bidder, starting at 6 figures. You can get ‘protective’ yellow garments from $99 (and up) at ebolasuits.com. Gizmodo ran a story on “6 Fake Ebola Cures Being Peddled Online” with Rima Laiblow’s Nano Silver in the #1 spot.

The screen behind Maddow shows Laiblow, then cuts to Rand Paul. This has all been an intro to Maddow taking down Paul for a recent speech in which he claimed Ebola is “incredibly contagious” and could be contracted by talking to someone at a cocktail party, and in which he accused the White House and CDC of covering up the true danger of the virus.

This guy is the leading contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016.

You should watch the clip, as Maddow is in high form, but here’s the summation for those who want a quick take:

After Maddow notes that the AP report of Paul’s speech indicated his “comments directly conflict with statements from world health authorities who have dealt with Ebola outbreaks since 1976” she goes on to discuss the fact that his ‘board certification’ in Opthalmalogy comes not from the actual Opthalmalogy Board, but from an ‘organization’ he founded with himself as president and his wife and father-in-law as officers.

[with dripping sarcasm] Trust Rand Paul when it comes to things like Ebola. Don’t trust ‘them’! Don’t trust the authorities. Trust him. He’s a doctor! Kind of.[end sarcasm]
…There’s a real need right now for us to have a sober national dialogue. We are having some of that, but we are also having people trying to cash in on it, and people using their positions of authority not to contribute meaningfully to the dialogue, but instead to recklessly make stuff up. Making stuff up hoping it might freak people out more than they already are, even though what he’s saying is sourced entirely from deep files and research he surely maintains on the subject at his homemade doctor group that he and his wife founded in a P.O. Box at a UPS Store down the block in Kentucky. Literally. It’s one thing to try to profit off people dying from a deadly disease, it’s another to exploit people’s fears to try to profit off pretending to address those fears — it is whole nother thing entirely to be in a position of authority and to stoke your own authority on the issue, while stoking fears, while seeking to profit from those fears, while you have no idea what you’re talking about, but people think you might.

Man, I glanced at the AoA comments. When Cia Parker is the voice of reason, you’ve got a serious infestation of crazy on your hands.

Man, I glanced at the AoA comments. When Cia Parker is the voice of reason, you’ve got a serious infestation of crazy on your hands.

It gets worse. The poster Serious Investigative Reporting needed has bought hook, line and sinker 5 6 different conspiracy theories in one post.

Oh Please. Spare me any more comments from CIA Parker, who is a known pathological liar, who blames her child’s ASD diagnoses on the snap diagnosis she made about her newborn’s encephalitic cry….yet never took her baby immediately to a hospital emergency room for a neurological examination.

She’s already informed us that (if you can believe anything she states) that she herself has an ASD diagnosis, has multiple family members who have varying degrees of developmental disabilities including ASDs and severe intellectual impairments, has a gene mutation commonly found to cause ASDS, was old (44 years of age) when she delivered her only child, never went to genetic counseling before conception, had an emergency C-section due to fetal distress (a true knot in her child’s umbilical cord)…and yet…in spite of these facts….her infant survived.

Parker claims that a Td booster given to her in college, caused her own MS…which was diagnosed more than ten years after receipt of the that Td booster, which prevents her from holding down a full time job. Yet, there she is posting hundreds of comments around the clock, spreading her lies, when she goes on her all-too-frequent commenting sprees…while she neglects her teen age special needs child.

Parker is still convinced that peanut products/peanut oils were used in the manufacture of vaccines licensed in the United States….in spite of the many citations that have been provided to her, but multiple sources, she uses homeopathic “medicine” on herself and her hapless child and wants her child to contract “natural measles”.

There is something or many things radically wrong with this woman and her thinking processes as well as her delusional thoughts she clings to; my guess is that she has a personality disorder (narcissistic type), which is common as dirt within the general population and which is a danger to her child, who is defenseless against the onslaught of Parker’s dangerous “belief system”.

P.S. she has been banned from multiple science blog, including the Shot of Prevention blog, because she resorts to using hundreds of sock puppets….yes she’s that desperate to be heard.

BTW, Parker doesn’t dare come to RI to posts comments, because I and a number of the RI regulars, are well aware of her stunts and the delusions that are her make believe world.

No you don’t

Oh, c’mon:

“I’m thinking Liberia likely has strategic and/or resource value that some want to use the U.S. military to obtain/secure.”

It reminds me of this bit of sharp thinking:

“According to Think Progress [heh], this number represents ‘nearly two-thirds of AFRICOM’s 4,800 assigned personnel’ who will coordinate with civilian organizations to distribute supplies and construct up to 17 treatment centers.”

In other news, 3000 represents nearly two-thirds of 4800 unrelated anything, such as AFRICOM’s assigned personnel. I could swear that the first version of this that I saw insinuated that it was really about tactical information gathering (for when the U.S. comes to reclaim the property usurped by the American Colonization Society, or something), but it’s hardly worth the effort to excavate.

Has this bit of dot-connecting been covered?

Sooooooooo…. as far back as 2004, geogie porgie set up the “Ebola” play. Nice eh? Spread the info around my friends!

Back at AoA there is a new bidder to replace Jake in the 6, 66 or 666 degrees of separation identification.

A quick google search shows Klains’ wife Monica is a lawyer for National Geographic.

Ah ha. That explains everything.

Ah ha. That explains everything.

This is a nice touch:

“One minute I’m afraid we live under the fourth Reich, and the next, the USSA (maybe it’s both) and not enough are concerned enough, but I guess we could have gotten an IACC-like committee instead.”

Yah. THE CHAIR IS AGAINST THE WALL.

Or his chief lackey, none other than Hipster Patrick McGoohan.

That’s weird. I have fond memories of running down that beach* aged about 15, though I wasn’t chased by a huge balloon, resulting in a mixture of relief and disappointment..

* It’s Portmeirion in Wales, which is worth a visit for Prisoner fans, and/or odd architecture aficionados, if you happen to be in the area.

the White House to reverse its policy on West African flights

Does the Executive branch have powers to arbitrarily curtail commerce in that way? My impression was that the Commerce clause makes it a Congressional responsibility.

Does the Executive branch have powers to arbitrarily curtail commerce in that way? My impression was that the Commerce clause makes it a Congressional responsibility.

The FAA is within the executive branch, and Congress has granted it rulemaking authority. I’m not going to investigate the details of its powers just now, but I’m guessing that they’re broad enough.

The folks over at AoA are going into overdrive today building a new “enemies” list – those individuals who they want to line up for any experimental Ebola vaccine…..

And poor Jake, looks like he’s finally managed to alienate what few allies he had left (re: his most recent post about Hooker praising Wakefield)…..

As near as I can tell, Jake hasn’t yet alienated Papa Doc and Baby (not) Doc Geier, and the White Rose loon. Also maybe not the Barry commenter. I figure that his list of ‘not enemies’ has to be getting very short these days.

A quick question, Lawrence – are all the comments at Jake’s place moderated? After all the comments you’ve made, do you have to wait to see your post come up, or is it more or less automatic? The traffic there seems very ‘bursty’, almost as if Jake approves everything. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to be filtering out people who seem to very much disagree with him. I guess this would make him an honest nutter.

@Johnny – Jake does “moderate” all posts, though he’s admitted that he’s only deleted very few (I believe a couple of John Best’s posts were too much, even for Jake).

I still get “in moderation” every time I write, so yes – he approves them when he gets to them.

Looks like Jake has crossed the “woo-bicon” when it comes to both Hooker & Wakefield….I doubt either one of them will ever cooperate (or converse) with him again after this most recent fiasco.

His list of “friends” must be incredibly short at this point.

Lawrence, you and the ‘other guy’ ( & diverse SB folk) should be congratulated for your appearances and ability to tolerate great loads of nonsense, conspiracy peddling and obfuscation.
Jake is really and truly a piece of work.

@John – it was a real disease & people got sick….how exactly is that a “hoax?”

Swine flu was a total hoax though.

It was? I want the time I spent sick in bed back.

Always with this colloidal silver/nano silver bullshit!!!

At very best it is a fairly weak anti-microbial. You gain surface area by grinding it in to so called ‘nano particles’ but there is no evidence at all to show this increases its effectiveness. And certainly not against ebolavirus!

It is one of those intellectual exercises where it sounds like it SHOULD work, if you discount the sliding scale of everything else that is going on in the body. I think that may be one of the primary problems that scammers do not understand; how the fact the response to a dose is not linear but – sometimes HUGELY – negatively exponential.

Hey Nigeria is now declared Ebola free and they don’t have a vaccine. They just made everyone stay at home. I suppose the CDC can’t market that, bad for shareholders.

Last year there wasn’t a pandemic, all the MD’s I know were told to stop testing after a few weeks of the bullshit reporting because most of the tests were negative for H1n1 or whatever you want to call it.

How come the CDC has a patent on the Ebola virus? Conspiracies don’t exist David, it’s all about marketing and the confidence ask Gok Wan.

Hey Nigeria is now declared Ebola free and they don’t have a vaccine. They just made everyone stay at home. I suppose the CDC can’t market that, bad for shareholders.

Note that Goofus’ sneering assumes that every nation on Earth has a strong government which gets enough cooperation from its citizenry that it can apply “hey, everybody, stay home” as a public health measure.

If you admit that there are places like Liberia and Sierra Leone where there just isn’t the infrastructure to make such a strategy successful as the only way to fight a disease, then it becomes obvious that we do need to have a vaccine in our arsenal if we’re going to bring the disease under control worldwide.

As for the CDC’s “patents on Ebola”, which cover only one strain, the simplest explanation is that our patent system is really messed up. In a sane world, the last thing you’d have to worry about, if you were a scientist trying to cure a disease as nasty as Ebola, would be some psychopath saying “Haha, I have a patent on the idea of an Ebola vaccine! You can’t go ahead and find that cure unless you pay to use my patent!!” But while we have a patent system which allows people to make ridiculously overbroad patent claims, and presumes the validity of any issued patent, it makes perfect sense to take out patents simply to make sure others won’t interfere with you. Are “defensive patents” yet another aspect of the world that Goofus is completely unaware of, just like Liberia’s troubled history?

Do you think that model would work in an industrialized first world country – to make ‘everyone’ stay at home? I personally would first of all not worry too much agout it anyway as I don’t plan to exchange fluids with an ebola patient. Secondly, when a vaccine does becomes available I will happily have that toxic stew of nanontechnology and mercury injected in to my arm. At which point I would revel in all the bodily fluids I wanted. Problem solved.

As for the CDC’s ‘patent on ebolavirus’… Come on chum… They have it in order to PREVENT biotech companies from issuing hostile, gouging patents of their own that would stifle innovation and narrow the field of research. The CDC in comparison allows anyone who wants to seriously study the virus to do so without worrying about licensing fees or infringing the rights of a rival company.

But you know this already.

Johnny not Hill: “Hey Nigeria is now declared Ebola free and they don’t have a vaccine. They just made everyone stay at home. I suppose the CDC can’t market that, bad for shareholders.”

The reason was that there was exactly one index case: a person who entered with Ebola from a neighboring African country. Most of the people he infected were the medical persons who treated him, and who worked very hard to keep him in the hospital so he would not infect others.

One particular doctor was quick in discovering that the patient she was treating had Ebola, and she unfortunately died:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29696011

The reason was that there was exactly one index case: a person who entered with Ebola from a neighboring African country.

Well, I wouldn’t describe Nigeria as neighboring Liberia, but Lagos and Port Harcourt are different kettles of fish from Meliandou.

Oh, look, Phildo had yummy in his tummy over Lew Rockwell just a few days ago. Anyway,

Last year there wasn’t a pandemic, all the MD’s I know were told to stop testing after a few weeks of the bullshіt reporting because most of the tests were negative for H1n1 or whatever you want to call it.

This is a pretty severe step down from Borges’ Nueva refutación del tiempo.

Yes, Narad. Sorry about the “neighboring” bit. I am a bit sleep deprived and could not mentally conjure up a map of Africa. The guy did fly there, and apparently Liberia accused the hospital of kidnapping him because they refused to let him leave.

Ok, what about the story published by Liberia’s leading newspaper which accused the United States military of developing Ebola (and HIV) and named names pertaining to the government and military agencies involved? Why do Africans distrust the Red Cross and other ‘aid’ orgs and NGO’s enough to attack them even murder them? I have no answers just questions. There’s so much BS to sift through from every direction as usual. This certainly isn’t being lost on the opportunistic politicians who won’t let a good tragedy go to waste.

I thought it was HUGE to see that Liberian news article accusing our military. It warrants investigation.

I suppose the author of this above debunking also believes that humans are always benevolent, especially those humans in positions of power. They would NEVER conspire against anyone in the name of personal gain now would they? Pharmaceutical companies only have our best interests in mind, ALWAYS, same with all government personnel, agencies and so forth. In fact, most humans want to do the right thing by each other, and the planet. People cannot be bought or be deceptive, the only people who are critical thinkers are those people who do not believe that other humans conspire against other humans.

Right, LOL?

I suppose the author of this above debunking also believes that humans are always benevolent, especially those humans in positions of power. They would NEVER conspire against anyone in the name of personal gain now would they? Pharmaceutical companies only have our best interests in mind, ALWAYS, same with all government personnel, agencies and so forth. In fact, most humans want to do the right thing by each other, and the planet. People cannot be bought or be deceptive, the only people who are critical thinkers are those people who do not believe that other humans conspire against other humans.

All you’ve demonstrated with your “supposing” is your own logical failings. There are more options in the world between “my conspiracy theory is true” and “all humans in the world are benevolent”; you’ve done nothing by knocking down that strawman except torpedo your own credibility. And in a nation with the terrible history of dictatorial and corrupt governments that Liberia has, there are certainly other explanations for “someone believes a conspiracy theory” other than “that conspiracy theory is true”.

I have no answers just questions.

How about coming back when you do have answers?

Ok, what about the story published by Liberia’s leading newspaper which accused the United States military of developing Ebola (and HIV) and named names pertaining to the government and military agencies involved?

What about it? Are the statements in the story substantiated? Was it a news story or an opinion piece? What is the reputation for honesty for that paper (honest question, as I don’t know)?

Why do Africans distrust the Red Cross and other ‘aid’ orgs and NGO’s enough to attack them even murder them?

Often it’s because the people who are doing the murder are various forms of criminal, rebel, or pirate. Sometimes it is because they have been grossly misinformed. The vast majority of Africans do not murder representatives from aid agencies; if you have evidence that this mistrust and muder is widespread, please share.

There’s so much BS to sift through from every direction as usual.

I was going to comment on this, but …

This certainly isn’t being lost on the opportunistic politicians who won’t let a good tragedy go to waste.

Possibly so, I see no reason why various people won’t try to use this for their own perceived best advantage. But then, people use traffic accidents and shark attacks for the same purpose, so there you go.

The actual article in question is quite entertaining. The author’s citations include barmy dentist Len Horowitz, a science fiction novel, and equally barmy Jon Rappaport. He claims, without a shred of evidence, that Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, has been “injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus”.

There’s a good take-down of the article here.

Wow, when even a site as interesting as breitbart.com says you’re wacko…

Re: distrust

One thing I left off is that certain African people have reason to distrust some foreigners, given the history of colonialism. That said, I’m still looking for evidence that there is a general distrust of aid workers who work for NGOs.

On the subject of conspiracy theorists, I have just been reading “The Flaxborough Crab”. In one scene, the loveable grifter Lucinda Teatime is writing a bulletin to send to the customers of her Herbal Virility scam:

Miss Teatime withdrew the sheet from the machine and carefully read it through. From time to time she nodded to herself. Plenty of capital letters. Excellent. Devotion to upper case, she had noticed, was one of the more consistent characteristics of Life Force enthusiasts.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120116/jsp/frontpage/story_15011108.jsp#.VEgup3-9KSM

Never mind the girls who are being harmed by the HPV vaccine. Your kid is ok one minute- they get a vaccine and the next day they are dead. But hey, it WASNT the vaccine!

Never mind all those parents who have claimed that their kids were fine before vaccines but were hurt, or worse dead immediately after vaccinations.

It happens. Do deny that people are harmed by vaccines is irresponsible.

If it happens to happen to you, you are screwed. You’ll just be collateral damage. Like the kids in India who developed polio from the vaccine.

How would you like your life to be reasoned away as justifiable collateral damage?

Do you people just see in black and white? Assumptions have been made about my first post here. Can we not ask questions without you pulling out the tinfoil hats? Frankly, you anti conspiracy people come across as equally irrational and zealous as the people who are full throttle against vaccines.

I think it is very healthy to question what is going into our bodies, whether it’s food, medicine or information we could be talking about. It makes more sense to me for people to be protective and empowered over their own bodies minds and lives rather than to blindly allow ANYONE or any institution all access. Doctors and other health professionals enjoy a certain power and authority which I often find to be arrogant- it is as if they believe they are entitled to this access without being questioned. I wish more health professionals honored their patients as being the highest authority over their bodies.

We aren’t ‘trained’ to be empowered now are we? How many humans even know what’s inside their own bodies or how their organs function to begin with? Let alone how to prevent diseases and problems? To nurture prevention would be to nurture empowerment.

This is not exactly a world that nurtures empowerment and awareness now is it? Please don’t argue that it is. I’ve lived here long enough to see the writing on the wall.

Never mind the girls who are being harmed by the HPV vaccine. Your kid is ok one minute- they get a vaccine and the next day they are dead. But hey, it WASNT the vaccine!
Never mind all those parents who have claimed that their kids were fine before vaccines but were hurt, or worse dead immediately after vaccinations.

Sounds like you are making definite claims, and all the flimflam about “just asking questions” is the usual disingenuous bullsh1t.

When vaccines cause harm….no big deal unless you’re one of the lucky ones who develop polio

You’re really not very good at that “comparative risk” thing, are you? Here, let me help:

“Until [the] early 1990s India was hyperendemic for polio, with an average of 500 to 1000 children getting paralysed daily.”

I am happy to let the Indian politicians and health experts work out their own relative risk calculations and decide on their own vaccination policies. It really is not my business.
If Eyes-open person thinks they are Doing It Wrong, perhaps he or she should go and argue with them.

Eyes wide open,
From the article you linked to:

the very vaccine it is using to fight polio is causing more polio paralysis than the wild poliovirus.

That’s because the wild polio virus has been eradicated in India, and even a very small number is greater than zero. There were 5 recorded cases of vaccine derived paralytic polio in the whole of India in 2013. This is a measure of the vaccine’s success, and means it’s time to move to the IPV, if someone can scrape the cash together.

Would you prefer India to go back to the good old days of 1978 when almost 1% of children surveyed in Lucknow suffered from paralytic polio? Or do you have some other alternative?

Minor correction – that Lucknow study was carried out in 1972-4 and published in 1978.

This is a measure of the vaccine’s success, and means it’s time to move to the IPV, if someone can scrape the cash together.

I’d say “start to move,” with a mixed IPV/OPV schedule. Continued sewage surveillance is going to be essential.

How many humans even know what’s inside their own bodies or how their organs function to begin with?

As a matter of fact, not many.
There are actually quite a number of erroneous ideas floating around.
There is a reason why biologists and physicians take 2-5 years, full time, to learn about human physiology and related fields. It’s complicated (see kidney’s function – very simple in its concept, deviously intricate in its operation), there are plenty of small details which no-one but a specialist in the field really needs to know (do you know the name of all proteins involved in blood clotting?) and it’s gross (who wants to learn about bodily fluids?).

That is not to say a layman shouldn’t try to learn about it. On the contrary, I agree that knowledge is power.
But.

If you look inside the archives, our host and most regulars here are perfectly willing to answer specific questions about biology and other matters – with citations you could look up.
But when the same question has been asked 20 times already and the questioner is ignoring our efforts to communicate and obviously just want to profess its beliefs… It’s a bit dishonest, isn’t it? Excuse us if we are not very welcoming of another JAQ guy.

Which brings me to:

I wish more health professionals honored their patients as being the highest authority over their bodies.

If you are stating that you should have the final decision about what should be going into your body, I would agree with that, within limits (you don’t get a similar free pass for your dependents).
If you wish healthcare people would spend more time talking to their patients and explaining what’s going on, you are not alone in this. The majority of healthcare specialists may join you on this.
If you are saying that systematically, on all medical matters, you know more about your body than someone who specializes into human medicine… Now, who is arrogant, here?

I enjoy this site….all MUST read a factual book that gives all the crap about virus/vaccines….research in America…and the corrupted “science” still continues today….ie…follow the dollar….the two factual books are…”Mary”s Monkey>>>and “The Hot Zone”…Read Mary’s Monkey very carefully and understand the time frame….jet it all forward to todays medical events (and the last 40 years)…IS THERE A PURE VACCINE???WHAT VIRUS S HAVE NOT BEEN REMOVED….PRAY FOR PLANET EARTH…

” But while we have a patent system which allows people to make ridiculously overbroad patent claims, and presumes the validity of any issued patent, it makes perfect sense to take out patents simply to make sure others won’t interfere with you.” Anus feldspar

Hey, I thought the world of science was coming together with some kind of humanitarian gesture, so I get it, the idea is to say ” I have patented the disease so you can’t fix it only me?” or have I got that wrong?

“There are more options in the world between “my conspiracy theory is true” ” Anus rock

Well I suppose all vaccines save lives is a good conspiracy too, I mean that’s some wazzed up believe system you got there. Most medics can’t even recognise someone whose healthy let alone make a proper diagnosis. So how many people dying in the Ebola zone are actually ‘tested’ confirmed cases? Don’t want to upset that patent do we?

Now that “wayne smith” has graced the audience with Haslam’s boneheaded conspiracy theory, it seems just as well to note that John Fryer Chemist has managed to connect Ebola to some sort of conspiracy to give the electron an integral charge.

Johnny, etc: “Well I suppose all vaccines save lives is a good conspiracy too, I mean that’s some wazzed up believe system you got there”

Why would that be a conspiracy? Why is it better to get measles than prevent it?

“So how many people dying in the Ebola zone are actually ‘tested’ confirmed cases?”

Why don’t you just fly over to one of those areas and help them out. You are obviously much smarter than any of those silly people who went to medical school.

Ok, I’m not reading every comment. But I will say this…your useage of the title “conspiracy theorists” amuses me. Did it ever once occur to you to see where the term originated, by whom, and why? People don’t always except what they’re told like good little sheep. Some of us question things. Your example of H1N1 shows your lack of knowledge because its been clinically and scientifically proven that the levels of mercury in the vaccine have caused (at that time) young or unborn children (now) to have delayed learning complications ranging from mild to ADHD to Autism. My son was 2 months before birth when I was forced by job to take the vaccine. The nurse even warned me of the potential harm even then! Swine flu was a hoax…not nonexistent, but a way to force inject people and cause paranoia. Was I paranoid? Nope. Am I paranoid about Ebola? Nope. But I’ll not receive any vaccines. Why should I? I’m more likely to die of pneumonia than Ebola. But here is my “why” question…perhaps with your “vast” knowledge you can explain it. Ebola was discovered in 1977. New strains since, 5total I believe? But Zaire is not what his strain of 2014 is. The makeup of the viral strands differ, by approximately 25%. Mutated strain of Zaire? Maybe. But remember, there is not just one patent held by the US. Google “Ebola virus patent” and you’ll find four pages of different patents and descriptions and which country researched a discovery (UN, China, and Canada, as well as US Dept of Defense). Why? If the reasoning were in fact valid that their research was to find vaccines and antibiotics, why after multiple experiments and playing around with these strains is there NOTHING!? That’s 37 years, in case you need help adding. I find it extremely hard to comprehend how in 37 years, the CDC has nothing but stockpiles of test tubes loaded with multiple variants of Ebola, and know nothing.

@Phoenix – perhaps because Ebola, despite its high mortality rate, has not infected that many people compared to most other diseases…which means that is isn’t a high-priority disease that gets lots and lots of resources (attention, yes, resources, no).

Just like a true conspiracy theorist – your upset that no vaccine is available & you’d also be upset if a vaccine was available….you get to be pissed both ways.

@Phoenix:

its been clinically and scientifically proven that the levels of mercury in the vaccine have caused (at that time) young or unborn children (now) to have delayed learning complications ranging from mild to ADHD to Autism.

Citation DEFINITELY needed.

Swine flu was a hoax…not nonexistent, but a way to force inject people and cause paranoia. Was I paranoid? Nope.

You sound pretty paranoid to me.

Why? If the reasoning were in fact valid that their research was to find vaccines and antibiotics, why after multiple experiments and playing around with these strains is there NOTHING!? That’s 37 years, in case you need help adding. I find it extremely hard to comprehend how in 37 years, the CDC has nothing but stockpiles of test tubes loaded with multiple variants of Ebola, and know nothing.

It’s harder than it looks to create a vaccine. That’s why.

Phoenix: there’s a corollary to Darwin’s Law that says as soon as you use the words “sheep” or “sheeple” in a post you are laughed out of court.

Your example of H1N1 shows your lack of knowledge because its been clinically and scientifically proven that the levels of mercury in the vaccine have caused (at that time) young or unborn children (now) to have delayed learning complications ranging from mild to ADHD to Autism.

Please provide citations for or links to the peer-reviewed journal articles where this scientific and clinical proofmay be found, so we can examine it ourselves.

I’m more likely to die of pneumonia than Ebola.

Absolutely true, but that says nothing about the safety or efficacy of vaccination–in fact, being vaccinated against infectious diseases which can result in your developing pnuemonia (influenza, measles, etc.), will significantly reduce the likelihood you’ll die from itnuemonia.

If the reasoning were in fact valid that their research was to find vaccines and antibiotics, why after multiple experiments and playing around with these strains is there NOTHING!?

Because developing a safe and effective vaccine isn’t a trivial exercise with a guarantee of short term success. If it were, we’d not only have had rotavirus and human pappiloma virus vaccines far earlier than we did but we wouldn’t still be pursuing an effective HIV vaccine. Note taht HIV afects far greater numbers of people worldwide and far greater resources have been allocated to developing a vaccine for HIV, so clearly the inherent difficulty of developing a safe and effective vaccine isn’t something that can be addressed just by throwing money and personel at it.

Phoenix: “Swine flu was a hoax…not nonexistent, but a way to force inject people and cause paranoia. Was I paranoid?”

That’s an interesting one – vaccines are devised to deliberately induce antivax paranoia. I’m gonna have to contact Merck to alert them to this self-defeating paradigm.

“People don’t always except what they’re told like good little sheep. Some of us question things.”

And some keep right on “questioning” even after getting answers that debunk their claims. Maybe Just Asking Questions is a vaccine-induced disease too.

“Ok, I’m not reading every comment.”

Good, it’s very risky to do that; you might learn something.

But I will say this…your useage of the title “conspiracy theorists” amuses me. Did it ever once occur to you to see where the term originated, by whom, and why?

These questions would have been more helpful if Phoenix had been willing to answer them. Where did the term originate then? Who originated it? Don’t leave us in suspense like an inconclusive X-Files episode!

If #138 is in fact a parody of the everything-is-a-lie skepticredulity that permeates the Interweb, then well done Phoenix!

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