The Science of Conspiracy Theories

The Ebola conspiracy

The Ebola conspiracy

This, my friends, is a particularly insidious conspiracy. When the Ebola outbreak became big news in August of 2014, the first thing that people did was accuse Obama of causing it, that his administration would use misinformation about Ebola to lull the American public into a false sense of security before they used the disease to control the population, establishing martial law so that it would lead to Obama becoming a dictator.

Senator Rand Paul, who is an ophthalmologist, claimed that the Ebola virus was metamorphosing into an airborne virus and that the government was covering it up. He alerted Glen Beck's radio show that they should warn the world that there would be a impending pandemic because Ebola would be highly transmittable. Of course this led to people claiming that Ebola would become a terrorist weapon and that it was being weaponized for this very use.

The Tea Party claimed that Obama was going to use the virus against large U.S. cities. They also claimed that Obama was doing this so that he could impose martial law and use this to force people to get a vaccine that would include an injection of a RFID chip so that the government could track them. This would allow the Affordable Care Act to allow the government to have direct access to the chip so that heath payments would be completed electronically. That's wild!

Let's see what Ebola really is. Ebola is a virus disease that causes a hemorrhagic fever in humans and primates. It's particularly virile and the symptoms are ugly. This disease has a high mortality rate and it's believed that fruit bats carry the virus in the wild. This particular virus must be spread by direct contact with body fluids, such as blood. There is no documented evidence for transmission through the air.

Another problem is that there are other diseases that mimic Ebola, including other hemorrhagic fevers. Malaria, cholera and typhoid fever have similar symptoms: fever, sore throat, muscular pain, headaches, followed by vomiting, diarrhea and rash. Basically, a person with Ebola bleeds internally from every orifice.

One of the reasons that a lot of people in Africa get infected is because of poor sanitation and the practice of washing the dead before burial. The way to control an epidemic is to isolate and prevent direct contact. In other words, further infection must be contained. There are experimental drugs to treat it and a vaccine is in the works.

So, the fact is that this conspiracy theory is without merit. Ebola would not be a good weapon idea. It's not infectious through the air. There are other diseases that would make better weapons, including anthrax, which is readily available.

Thanks for reading.