Title: Ebola: Who created this terrible virus and why?
Author: Antoine Roger Lokongo
Category: Health and AIDS
Date: 1/8/2015
Source: Pambazuka News, Issue 708
Source Website: http://www.pambazuka.net
African Charter Article# 16: Every individual shall have the right to enjoy the best attainable state of physical and mental health.
Summary & Comment: An analyst gives reasons to believe that Ebola outbreak is not natural but some form of bio-warfare. The writer says leaks from within Western establishments and the behaviour of these capitalist powers fuel the theories that are difficult to ignore. MM
http://pambazuka.net/en/category/features/93681
The latest success story about Ebola coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is that the DRC has completely eradicated the Ebola epidemic which broke out in the Djera region by relying only on the experience of its own medical practioners (79 people died). DRC has experienced Ebola seven times. Historically, the Ebola type of virus first broke out in Germany - that is why it is called Marburg Virus - then in Reston in the United States as Prof. Horace Campbell previously wrote in Pambazuka. So Ebola virus did not originate in the DRC (Mobutu who worked for the CIA could have used it for his own political purposes).
Ebola first broke out in Zaire, now DRC, in 1976, and re-occurred seven times, so much so that Congolese health practitioners and medical experts have developed a wealth of experience (just like some Chinese military and civilian personnel helping Africans overcome Ebola now in West Africa because they themselves had accumulated a wealth of experience after a long fight against the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China in 2004). Now, those Congolese practitioners are currently providing their expertise to other African countries affected by Ebola. In fact, China had only to provide Congo with equipment and local Congolese experts did the job themselves.
In addition, top African business leaders, including billionaires Aliko Dangote, Strive Masiyiwa, Patrice Motsepe, in joint collaboration with the African Union, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), have established an emergency fund to help countries hit by the Ebola outbreak. A pledging meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised $28.5 million to deploy at least 1,000 health workers to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to a BBC report. That is good news for Africa's self-confidence, a readiness to take its destiny into her own hands. This local competence and capacity have to be recognized and strengthened. And that is what China and Cuba are doing.
DRC EBOLA SUCCESS STORY IGNORED
So, why are Western media not highlighting the latest success story about Ebola coming out of the DRC? Because an international conspiracy against the DRC exists! Nothing good could ever come out of Congo! Secondly, such a success story, if highlighted, would kill the Western NGOs' business of counting the dead to generate funds. Thirdly, Western experts have tried unsuccessfully to link the outbreak of Ebola in the DRC with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, discrediting themselves in the process of this 'Congo bashing'.
According to the WHO latest toll released just before Christmas, Sierra Leone accounts for the most cases, 8,939 deaths, while Liberia has 7,830 and Guinea 2,571. However, the Western media spread a lot of myths in order to hide America's Ebola deadly, gruesome and macabre project behind the cloak of 'humanitarian intervention'!
EBOLA IS PART US BIO-WARFARE IN AFRICA
In his previous articles published in Pambazuka, this writer already relayed the American law professor Francis A. Boyle's interview with Aggeliki Dimopoulou of Greece-based tvxs.gr in which he categorically stated that USA bio-warfare laboratories in West Africa are the origins of the Ebola epidemic. This led Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy to ask: 'Is the US government the master criminal of our time?' (Press TV, 20 October 2014). Dr Roberts also argued that although the public continues to be reassured that Ebola is not a problem for the US, the fact that CNN reported that President Obama appointed an Ebola czar who is not a medical person but an insider lawyer who served as chief of staff to Vice President Biden, proves that Ebola conspiracy theories which are spreading faster than Ebola, as far as any of us knows, could be true (Press TV, 13 October 2014).
'What we are dealing with here is a biological warfare work that was conducted at the bio-warfare laboratories set up by the USA on the west coast of Africa. And if you look at a map produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) you can see where these laboratories are located. And they are across the heart of the Ebola epidemic, at the west coast of Africa. So, I think these laboratories, one or more of them, are the origins of the Ebola epidemic. They did the same in Nicaragua and Cuba,' Professor Francis A. Boyle revealed.
He went on: 'I have absolute proof from a Pentagon document that the Centers for Disease Control were doing bio-warfare work for the Pentagon in Sierra Leone, the heart of the outbreak, as early as 1988. And indeed it was probably before then because they would have had to construct the lab and that would have taken some time. So we know that Fort Detrick and the Centers for Disease Control are over there, Tulane University, which is a well-known bio-warfare center here in USA-I would say notorious for it-is there. They all have been over there.
'In addition, the US government made sure that Liberia, a former colony of the USA, never became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention, so they were able to do bio-warfare work over there - going back to 1980s - the USA government, in order to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention. Likewise, Guinea, the third state affected here - and there is an increase now - didn't even sign the Biological Weapons Convention. So, it seems to me that the different agencies of the US government have always been there to try to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention and engage in bio-warfare work. Indeed, we had one of these two lab bio-warriors admit in the New York Times that they were not over there for the purpose of either screening or treating people. That's not what these labs are about. These labs are there in my opinion to do bio-warfare work for different agencies of the US government. Indeed, many of them were set up by USAID. And everyone knows that USAID is penetrated all up and down by the CIA and the CIA has been involved in bio-warfare work as well.'
Since then, other startling revelations just kept coming out, proving Professor Francis A. Boyle right.
The Observer, a Liberian daily newspaper, on Tuesday 9 September 2014, published an article written by Dr. Cyril Broderick, a former professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia's College of Agriculture and Forestry.
Dr. Broderick started by charging that an article published in the Internet news summary publication of the US-based 'Friends of Liberia' which he read, was laughable because it alleged that the initiation of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was due to the contact of a two-year-old child with bats that had flown in from the Congo.
Aren't we all stupid, they think? We would believe that bats can fly all the way from Congo to Liberia, hundreds of kilometres away, with the purpose of biting a Liberian girl so she can spread the Ebola Virus? How come these bats did not bite any other people in other countries you find between Liberia and Congo which have not reported any Ebola outbreak at all? Are they saying that these bats flew all the way from Congo to Liberia without any stop-over? Come on!
In response, Dr. Broderick sent an article to 'Friends of Liberia' to be published in its web site, in which he argued that deadly diseases such as Ebola and AIDS are bio-weapons being tested on Africans. In addition, other reports have linked the Ebola virus outbreak to an attempt to reduce Africa's population. Liberia happens to be the continent's fastest growing population. But the professor's article was not published. Finally, the Daily Observer accepted to publish the article because it contains compelling truths.
According to Dr. Broderick, Ebola is a genetically-modified organism; it has a terrible history because its testing has been secretly taking place. Sites around Africa have over the years been set up for testing emerging diseases, especially Ebola. By who?
(a) The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a well-known centre for bio-war research, located at Fort Detrick, Maryland;
(b) Tulane University, in New Orleans, USA, winner of research grants, including a grant of more than $7 million from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to fund research with the Lassa viral haemorrhagic fever;
(c) The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC);
(d) Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French name, Medicins Sans Frontiers);
(e) Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company;
(f) The UK's GlaxoSmithKline; and
(g) The Kenema Government Hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone.
Reports such as the one published by Theguardian.com, 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. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a 'First in Human' Ebola clinical trial (NCT02041715, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March). Disturbingly, many reports also conclude that the US government has a viral fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Kenema, a town at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Dr. Broderick finally called upon African leaders and African countries to take the lead in defending babies, children, African women, African men, and the elderly who do not deserve to be used as Guinea pigs and highlighted the need for legal action against the U. S., Canada, France, and the U.K. to obtain redress for damages incurred due to the perpetuation of injustice in the death, injury and trauma imposed on Liberians and other Africans by the Ebola and other disease agents.
AIDS AND EBOLA VIRUSES ARE HUMAN-MADE
The UK-based Newstime Africa (NTA) published an article on 14 December 2014 in which its journalist Joel Savage interviewed Dutch Scientist Professor Johan Van Dongen, who contacted him and asked for help to spread the message that Aids and Ebola viruses are human-made and tested on Africans in Uganda and Zaire, in order to find vaccines against them for military defence purposes. What African leaders don't know, according to Professor Johan Van Dongen, is that the viruses of Ebola and Aids, were long created within bacteria factories to depopulate Africa.
Professor Dongen argues that Africans have undergone all kinds of trials and tribulations. They were used, abused, mocked, scorned, hanged and sold into slavery by the White man. There is no statue of Adolf Hitler anywhere, because he killed six million Jews, but there are statues of a Belgian king, Leopold II, who killed over 10 million Africans in Congo, throughout Belgium. In addition there are many streets named after him. These are some of the evidences that the life of a Black man is meaningless and valueless to the White man.
Dongen said: 'In Africa, there were varieties of wide experiments of dubious scientists vaccinating children with contaminated vaccines. For example, the World Health Organization can't deny that they are not aware from 1954 to 1957 that Dr. Hillary Koprowski injected over a million Africans with the viruses of Aids and Ebola, deceiving them it was vaccine for polio. Between 1960 and 1973, tests were held on a major initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) at a medical field research site in the West Nile district.
'Three times a year, blood was taken from about 45,000 children, (including babies) to investigate a relationship which existed between a common endemic disease and the virus that causes mononucleosis. But that wasn't the reason. They were actually looking for antibodies against micro-organisms, the reason those children and babies were given contaminated polio vaccines. I have a message for African leaders. Aids and Ebola are medical crimes to depopulate Africa. African leaders have to stop Europeans and Americans from testing vaccines in any African country'
Dongen first revealed those crimes in his books written in Netherlands, but the governments of Holland and Belgium were able to discourage the sale of the books and finally banned them. It was very easy for the two governments to ban those books, because it is only Belgium and Holland that speak the same language (Flemish) in Europe. But that wasn't the end of his ordeal; considered a 'Whistle-blower' by his native country, Holland, he lost his job and house. 'The only thing I didn't lose is my wife and my brain,' said Professor Dongen.
AIDS AND EBOLA NOT FROM CONGOLESE BATS AND MONKEYS
Dongen dismissed another myth according to which Aids and Ebola came from monkeys in Congo because Congolese people eat monkeys and human contact with monkeys resulted in the outbreaks. African people have been hunting for centuries and eating wild animals has not decimated the whole African population. This is an insult to the African culture. Have Europeans and Americans stopped eating beef because of mad cow disease?
Professor Dongen stressed that Aids and Ebola are medical crimes to depopulate Africa, adding that, the case is very sensitive, especially due to those involved: America, Belgium, Holland Germany, and World Health Organization. Authorities for decades have tried to cover up those crimes. Africa accounts for 25 million out of the estimated 38 million people across the world infected with HIV, and the vast majority of infected Africans are women, according to UNAIDS estimates.
Professor Johan Van Dongen cited Kenyan ecologist, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai, who, on October 9, 2004, restated her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent.
'Some say that AIDS came from monkeys. I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys since time immemorial. Others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that. Black people are dying more than any other people in this planet.' Maathai spoke at a press conference in Nairobi, a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.
'It's true that there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not invaded Iraq'. Maathai, then Kenyan deputy environment and natural resources minister, said.
'In fact, the HIV virus is created by a scientist for biological warfare. Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where the virus came from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.'
The United States congratulated Maathai on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but tempered its praise over her claims about AIDS. 'She said (HIV/AIDS) was invented as a bio-weapon in some laboratory in the West,' a senior State Department official said. 'We don't agree with that.'
This writer totally agrees with the late Kenyan ecologist because Africa should not be killed in silence! And so we ask: Did the biological agents that were created during the Apartheid regime in South Africa, including the Marburg and Ebola viruses to exterminate Black Africans, also come from bats and monkeys? Aren't we all stupid, they think?
As Daniel Taylor wrote in The Old-Thinker News on 20 October 2014, operating out of South Africa during the Apartheid era in the early 1980's, Dr. Wouter Basson, a.k.a. 'Dr. Death', launched a secret bioweapons project called Project Coast. The goal of the project was to develop biological and chemical agents that would either kill or sterilize the black population and assassinate political enemies. Among the agents developed were Marburg and Ebola viruses.
Basson is surrounded by cloak and dagger intrigue, as he told Pretoria High court in South Africa that 'The local CIA agent in Pretoria threatened me with death on the sidewalk of the American Embassy in Schoeman Street.' According to a 2001 article in The New Yorker magazine, the American Embassy in Pretoria was 'terribly concerned' that Basson would reveal deep connections between Project Coast and the United States.
In 2013, Basson was found guilty of 'unprofessional conduct' by the South African health council. Bioweapons expert Jeanne Guillemin writes in her book Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, 'The project's growth years were from 1982 to 1987, when it developed a range of biological agents (such as those for anthrax, cholera, and the Marburg and Ebola viruses and for botulinum toxin).'
Basson's bioweapons program officially ended in 1994, but there has been no independent verification that the pathogens created were ever destroyed. The order to destroy them went directly to Dr. Basson. According to the Wall Street Journal, 'The integrity of the process rested solely on Dr. Basson's honesty.'
Basson claims to have had contact with western agencies that provided 'ideological assistance' to Project Coast. Basson stated in an interview shot for the documentary Anthrax War that he met several times with Dr. David Kelly, the infamous UN weapons inspector in Iraq. Kelly was a top bioweapons expert in the United Kingdom. He was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire in 2003. While the official story claims he committed suicide, medical experts highly doubt this story.
In a 2007 article from the Mail Online, it was reported that a week prior to his death, Dr. Kelly was to be interviewed by MI5 about his ties to Dr. Basson.
Dr. Timothy Stamps, Minister of Health of Zimbabwe, suspected that his country was under biological attack during the time that Basson was operating. Stamps told PBS Frontline in 1998 that 'The evidence is very clear that these were not natural events. Whether they were caused by some direct or deliberate inoculation or not, is the question we have to answer.'
Stamps specifically named the Ebola and Marburg viruses as suspect. Stamps thinks that his country was being used as a testing ground for weaponized Ebola.
'I'm talking about anthrax and cholera in particular, but also a couple of viruses that are not endemic to Zimbabwe [such as] the Ebola type virus and, we think also, the Marburg virus. We wonder whether in fact these are not associated with biological warfare against this country during the hostilities. Ebola was along the line of the Zambezi [River], and I suspect that this may have been an experiment to see if a new virus could be used to directly infect people.'
The Ghanaian Times reported in early September on the recent Ebola outbreak, noting connections between Basson and bioweapons research. The article points out that, '.there are two types of scientists in the world: those who are so concerned about the pain and death caused to humans by illness that they will even sacrifice their own lives to try and cure deadly diseases, and those who will use their scientific skill to kill humans on the orders of. government.'
Indeed, these ideas are not new. Plato wrote over 2,000 years ago in his work The Republic that a ruling elite should guide society, '.whose aim will be to preserve the average of population.' He further stated, 'There are many other things which they will have to consider, such as the effects of wars and diseases and any similar agencies, in order, as far as this is possible, to prevent the State from becoming either too large or too small.'
As revealed by The Age, Nobel Prize-winning Australian microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet secretly urged the Australian government in 1947 to develop bio-weapons for use against the 'overpopulated countries of South-East Asia.' In a 1947 meeting with the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee, the group recommended that 'the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group.'
This information gives us an interesting perspective on the recent unprecedented Ebola outbreak. Is it an organic natural phenomenon? Did this strain of Ebola accidentally escape from a bioweapons lab? Or was it deliberately released?
USA CREATED EBOLA VIRUS AS A WEAPON WITH ITS VACCINE
Pravda reported on November 8, 2014 that USA created Ebola virus as a biological weapon as well as its vaccine for the profit of American pharmaceutical companies. Fortunately, both China and Russia have also developed their own vaccines against Ebola virus, which will break the monopoly of American pharmaceutical companies.
According to Pravda, Pentagon scientists were developing it for 30 years, and all the rights for the drug belong to the government of the United States. Two infected US medics received injections of the vaccine and they started recovering from the disease immediately.
Why has this been made public only now? Why is it that the USA holds all the rights for the use of the vaccine? There can be two most obvious answers found to these questions.
As one can see, Ebola is a perfect biological weapon: it spreads quickly and gives nearly 100 per cent mortality. Those having the life-saving vaccine can dictate any conditions to others.
The second answer is a purely commercial interest. It is enough to arrange panic with the help of the media, as it was the case with several epidemics before, such as avian flu. Afterwards, it will be possible to sell the life-saving medicine at any price.
However, Russian scientists doubt that the Americans created the medicine indeed. Russian scientists also conducted the research on the virus to be able to create a vaccine against it. Soviet scientists, for example, Professor Alexander Butenko, was a member of the joint Soviet-Guinean expedition in 1982 and spent nearly a year in the rain forests of Guinea, when the then unknown virus was discovered.
The current distribution of the infection is a continuation of a dangerous outbreak of the disease from 1982, said Professor Butenko. Russian scientists have the most extensive scientific base for the creation of the vaccine, Butenko says. The materials that Alexander Butenko collected a quarter of a century ago should help today's generation of Russian scientists to develop a vaccine against the fever.
Several Russian researchers are already in Guinea, including the head of the Laboratory for the Ecology of Viruses, Mikhail Shchelkanov. 'Currently, the vaccine has passed five tests quite well. The tests of the vaccine are going through the final stage, but no one knows when they are going to end,' said Mikhail Shchelkanov.
AIDS AND EBOLA AND US PYSCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
The Herald, a Zimbabwean daily sees Ebola as yet part of American psy-ops and militarisation of African drive. On September 29, 2014, Herald published reports by Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana and Jon Rappoport wrote that the Ebola outbreak in West and Central Africa had become yet another cliché coming out of the mouth of Westerners besides HIV/AIDS pandemic as well as the hydra of terrorism and bout of violent conflicts, to continue to perpetuate a negative image of Africa. This is to justify a post-9/11 terror-centric security messianism which has been perking up on Washington's foreign policy chariot wheels in Africa riding there in order to terminate the ills of Africa. This security messianism is characterised by an insulated minimalist engagement riding on a missionary rhetorical commitment to African security. In fact, the Obama regime deployed 4,000 Americans into the areas where the disease rages and they became who came to save hapless Africans. It is a psychological as well as military operation 'to win hearts and minds of the same people Ebola virus was unleashed against'.
During the George W. Bush administration, oil corporations such as Mobil Oil and Chevron owned a share of some HIV-medicine patents and medication. Not only had US foreign policy aid to HIV made vast profit for US firms, but it softly tied up HIV/AIDS' industrial headquarters to oil corporations and the creation of the unified command for Africa to oversee security and conduct military operations as necessary.
On September 16, 2014, President Obama made public his decision to establish a joint military command headquarters in Liberia by quickly dispatching 3,000 US troops to Monrovia and Senegal. The Ebola outbreak crafted its own response to the military footprint on the continent.
To be sure, demilitarising epidemic diseases in West Africa will divert resources to building roads that lead to good hospitals and schools of medicine to train public health personnel for the continent.
Why is the United States doing all this? According to Abayomi Azikiwe, civil rights activist and editor of the Pan-African News Wire, the US is using Ebola to advance imperialist agenda in Africa.
At the same time, President Barack Obama argued that US military must be involved in tackling the Ebola outbreak in West Africa because it represents a serious national security concern. There you are! America does not do anything in Africa for Africa's sake!
'I believe this is just another means for the United States military intelligence to deepen penetrate into the African continent. Already the United States has military presence in Liberia, Sierra Leone, as well as the West African state of Nigeria, all of which have been. impacted by the epidemic of the Ebola virus,' Azikiwe wrote.
'The only way in which this disease can be tackled is through the proliferation of medical personnel, trained doctors, nurses, the development of the field hospitals and clinics, and through this process that the disease can be arrested,' he added.
'The reason why this disease is having such a traumatic impact on Africa.a lot of it is a direct result of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It has been admitted by the World Health Organization, the MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders), the African regional organizations themselves, that there are not adequate healthcare facilities in these various countries - adequate research facilities - so this disease can be tackled both through research as well as through medical treatment,' the civil rights activist noted.
'This treatment will be designed to contain a virus and also to eliminate it. But it's not a military solution, it's a medical solution, and the medical solution is definitely related to the lack of development and the lack of resources in the entire region,' he stated.
'The Ebola cases that have been sent to the United States for treatment have gotten very positive results and that's directly related to the level of medical facilities and healthcare professionals that can address this issue,' Azikiwe said. 'But it's not a military issue, it's a medical issue, and the medical issue is definitely related to the question of development in West Africa.'
Africans' rights of passage to foreign lands must be totally abridged and if they must pass, they must be thoroughly screened before being thrown into quarantine without any explanation - with the accompanying life stigma - all because of their skin pigmentation or the accident of geography, as Josef Omorotionmwan reported for the Nigerian daily, The Vanguard.
Sometimes, it takes the courage of people like Kenneth and Jacynth Ivey, a UK couple of African descent who went to The Gambia purposely to do their wedding. They have denounced western media reports for stigmatizing West Africa and tarring the whole continent with the same brush of being epicenter of the Ebola disease.
IMF RUBS SALT INTO THE WOUND
A week before Christmas, the IMF demanded that Sierra Leone repay the sum of US$2.7 million, a further US$1.8 million on Christmas Eve and US$1 million on 29 December this year. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, three West African countries affected by the outbreak of Ebola Virus owe a whopping US$464 million to the IMF, out of a total debt of US$3.6 billion. You would expect the IMF and the World Bank to cancel those debts but for Bretton Woods Institutions, Ebola is none of their important concerns. Those calls have just been ignored as Ibrahim Tarawallie reported for the Sierra Leonan daily, The Concorde Times. Sierra Leone's external debts currently stand at US$1,258 million, of which US$168 million is owed to the IMF and US$235 million to the World Bank.
In an article published in Africa Is a Country on 19 October 2014, Liberian Professor Thandika Mkandawire argued that, in many ways, one could argue that Ebola serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring cronyism in countries where a government that is friendly to Western governments is in place. Liberia is one of the most dependent countries on Earth: 73% of its gross national income comes from aid agencies and Monrovia, its capital city, is crawling with aid agencies. There are literally hundreds of international NGOs with offices in the city, and in addition to the $800 million the country receives in foreign assistance each year, the UN spends an additional $500 million annually on maintaining a peacekeeping force.
So, one might have expected that the easiest place to contain Ebola would have been Liberia. There are already 7500 UN troops on the ground that would be able to mount the kind of logistical effort necessary to reach homes and communities with chlorine bleach, to transport the sick and to ensure stability should panic spark violence. The reality has been the opposite. From day one, the handling of the Ebola outbreak has been a study in the dysfunction of the aid system. The aid community has created a mentality that the country cannot act on its own. Instead Liberia's leaders have chosen to wait for the slow moving bureaucracies that have occupied it for a decade to wake from the inertia of the well-fed aid system. They have convened press conferences and made pledges, but there is no plan in place for a comprehensive response.
Efforts thus far have been so externally driven that even the identification of the virus itself took place in France. MSF staff who first picked up on the outbreak early this year had to fly blood samples to a lab in Lyons because there is not a single institute for tropical health and medicine on the African continent. This bears repeating: despite the existence of tropical medicine institutes on the continent, the blood samples were sent to Lyons for checking.
The Liberian Ebola situation can be summed up thus: a virus that is deadly but can be effectively contained with good planning and logistics has managed to escape from a country that has one of the largest concentrations of 'helpers' in the world.
The failure to recognize this is understandable. Africa is ground zero for the devastation wrought by decades of bad development advice and poor planning. Ebola is simply a mask; the ugly face of a global aid system that is broken. And so the outbreak - in the context of a country that is all helped out - provides a heart-breaking reminder of how little Africans trust the Western governments on whom they rely during disasters.
We may need them, but we are loath to trust that they have our best interests at heart, Professor Thandika Mkandawire concluded.
* Antoine Roger Lokongo, a Congolese journalist, is a doctoral candidate in Beijing, China.
REFERENCES
Dr. Cyril Broderick, 'Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?' Daily Observer, September 9, 2014, http://www.liberianobserver.com/security/ebola-aids-manufactured-western-pharmaceuticals-us-dod, consulted on December 30, 2014.
Joel Savage, 'Aids and Ebola are medical crimes against Africa: A message to all African leaders: says Dutch Scientist Professor Johan Van Dongen,' Newstime Africa, December 14, 2014, http://www.newstimeafrica.com/archives/37048, consulted on December 30, 2014.
Daniel Taylor, 'Secret Project Created Weaponized Ebola in South Africa in the 1980s,' The Old-Thinker News, October 20 , 2014,http://www.oldthinkernews.com/2014/10/19/secret-project-created-weaponized-ebola-in-south-africa-in-the-1980s/, consulted on ) October 31, 2014.
Aggeliki Dimopoulou, 'US Bio-warfare Laboratories In West Africa Are The Origins Of The Ebola Epidemic', Information Clearing House, 28 October 2014, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40012.htm, accessed 3 November 2014.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, 'Is the US government the master criminal of our time?' Press TV, 20 October 2014, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/382993.html, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, 'US exposes troops to Ebola to test vaccines,' Press TV, October 13, 2014http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/18/382659/us-uses-troops-to-test-ebola-vaccines/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
'USA created Ebola virus as biological weapon?", Pravda, November 8, 2014, http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/11-08-2014/128247-ebola_biological_weapon-0/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana and Jon Rappoport, 'Ebola, psy-ops and militarisation of Africa,' The Herald, September 29, 2014,http://www.herald.co.zw/ebola-psy-ops-and-militarisation-of-africa/, http://www.herald.co.zw/ebola-psy-ops-and-militarisation-of-africa/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Abayomi Azikiwe, 'US using Ebola to advance imperialist agenda in Africa,' Press TV, September 9, 2014, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/09/09/378229/us-uses-ebola-to-advance-imperialist-agenda/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Josef Omorotionmwan, 'Ebola as grand conspiracy against Africa,' The Vanguard, October 23, 2014, http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/10/ebola-grand-conspiracy-africa/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Abdou Rahman Sallah, 'UK couple denounce western media Ebola reports on West Africa,' The Point, November 13, 2014, http://thepoint.gm/africa/gambia/article/uk-couple-denounce-western-media-ebola-reports-on-west-africa, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Ibrahim Tarawallie, 'Calls for IMF, World Bank to cancel Salone debts,' Concorde Times, December 19, 2014, http://slconcordtimes.com/calls-for-imf-world-bank-to-cancel-salone-debts/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
Thandika Mkandawire, 'There is no Ebola here: What Liberia teaches us about the failures of aid,' Africa Is A Country, October 19, 2014, http://africasacountry.com/there-is-no-ebola-here-what-liberia-teaches-us-about-the-failures-of-aid/, consulted on December 31, 2014.
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