Saturday, September 27, 2014

USA Right Wing Ebola Conspiracy Propaganda Results in Aid Workers Deaths in Africa

A Liberian, a professor teaching at the University of Delaware, is responsible for pouring gasoline on the metaphorical fire of rabid rumors that Americans caused the outbreaks of Ebola, past and present.

Health care workers, including western health care workers, are being killed by terrified residents of countries that distrust their own government due to extreme corruption, and which distrust us as well. 

Contributing to that fear and ignorance is Professor Cyril Broderick, Sr.  Broderick is a tenured professor, of plant physiology and pathology in the Agricultural College.  He has no expertise in medicine, or epidemiology.

from the original WaPo article:
As those military doctors and officials begin what will be a difficult task, among the challenges they face are rumors that spread fear — fear of Ebola, fear of quarantine measures and fear of doctors. Already, several medical workers have been murdered in Guinea — throats slit, bodies dumped in a latrine. Then six Red Cross volunteers were attacked earlier this week while they tried to collect the body of an Ebola victim.
And now, in what may plant further seeds of mistrust and suspicion, a major Liberian newspaper, the Daily Observer, has published an article by a Liberian-born faculty member of a U.S. university implying the epidemic is the result of bioterrorism experiments conducted by the United States Department of Defense, among others.
Broderick might as well have painted a target on the backs of those who are in Africa to help, both foreign and local.

His sources were a bunch of right wing nut conspiracy theory sites, including the Liberty Beacon propaganda outlet, and Global Research in Canada.  These sites are same ones that insist climate change is not real, much less anthropogenic, and where they try to promote that the President was really born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim terrorist gay drug using murderer.  The sites are of the ilk of Alex Jones Infowars, and include a so-called reporter linked variously to Jones and other crackpots.  In this case, primarily  a man by the name of Jon Rappoport, apparently who describes the Ebola crimes:

The research program, occurring in Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, and Liberia—said to be the epicenter of the 2014 Ebola outbreak—has the announced purpose, among others, of detecting the future use of fever-viruses as bioweapons.
Is this purely defensive research? Or as we have seen in the past, is this research being covertly used to develop offensive bioweapons?
For the last several years, researchers from Tulane University have been active in the African areas where Ebola is said to have broken out in 2014.
These researchers are working with other institutions, one of which is USAMRIID, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a well-known center for biowar research, located at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
In Sierra Leone, the Tulane group has been researching new diagnostic tests for hemorrhagic fevers.
The third document is found on the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation Facebook page (no login required), dated July 23 at 1:35pm. It lays out emergency measures to be taken. We find this curious statement: “Tulane University to stop Ebola testing during the current Ebola outbreak.”
Why? Are the tests issuing false results? Are they frightening the population? Have Tulane researchers done something to endanger public health?
In addition to an investigation of these matters, another probe needs to be launched into all vaccine campaigns in the Ebola Zone. For example. HPV vaccine programs have been ongoing. Vials of vaccine must be tested to discover ALL ingredients. Additionally, it’s well known that giving vaccines to people whose immune systems are already severely compromised is dangerous and deadly.

The response from Delaware State University via the WaPo:

Delaware State University said it won’t interfere with the free speech rights of a tenured professor who wrote a wildly speculative and conspiratorial article in a Liberian newspaper in which he claimed that the U.S. government manufactured the Ebola virus and spread it in West Africa under the guise of vaccine testing.
“The university is not going to abridge his First Amendment rights to give his opinion about the issues of the day,” said Carlos Holmes, a spokesman for the school, where Cyril Broderick is an associate professor in the agriculture and natural resources department.
The article in question — headlined “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?” — appeared in a major Liberian newspaper, the Daily Observer, earlier this month.
“Reports narrate stories of the US Department of Defense (DoD) funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone,” Broderick wrote.

Officials at the university first became aware of Broderick’s article on Friday, after The Post reported on its contents, Holmes said.
He declined to comment on whether the university had spoken to Broderick, citing a policy of keeping “personnel issues” private.
“A lot of people can have tenure at a university and then they’ll go out and commit mass murder, okay,” Holmes said. “We didn’t know that they would do that before they were granted tenure.
“You’re talking about something that is happening first of all after he has been granted tenure.”

It sounds like Broderick won't face any negative pressure from the college but on the other hand, this kind of poor grade bad science cannot recommend him to the institution where his area of expertise is expected and required to be more scientific than this rubbish.

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