By oracknows
on October 19, 2014.
I'm beginning to feel that I'm flogging a topic a bit too hard again. Usually, this happens primarily when I'm on a roll over some particularly tasty ridiculous tidbit of antivaccine nonsense. This time around, it's not so much antivaccine nonsense (although some did manage to slip its way into the discussion) but rather Ebola virus disease. In particular, it's the conspiracy theories and quackery that have sprung up in the media like so much kudzu smothering rational and science-based discourse, revealing the depths of distrust based on politics, pseudoscience, and just plain nonsense that our public health officials have to deal with. There really are people out there who believe that the CDC, the WHO, the government, big pharma, and medicine itself are in cahoots to inflict a virus that kills more than half the people it infects on poor people in Africa and allow it to spread to more developed countries, all in order to create a market for drugs and vaccines against it to enrich our pharma overlords. There really are people who believe that President Obama actually wants Ebola to become established in the US because he wants to infect white people in order make the US more like his “home” in Africa.