October 18, 2014 
Over the last couple of weeks, reading at doomer forums and the comment sections of some doomer blogs, I’ve seen some of the most irrational (and frankly, sometimes venal) conspiracy theories I’ve ever read. Come on, folks, get a grip.
So, are the elite/government/CDC/MIC trying to kill us all by “culling the herd” with Ebola? My answer – based solely on my having worked in both isolation units and surgery (which is sort of a reverse isolation where we are trying to keep the patient from getting infected by us) – would be, No. (Though in defense of those more conspiratorially minded than I am, the hubris and miscommunication about how ready we were shown by both the federal government – especially the CDC – and the Dallas hospital involved in our first minor outbreak here in the US certainly might have looked like it.) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/us/lax-us-guidelines-on-ebola-led-to-poor-hospital-training-experts-say.html?action=click&contentCollection=US%20Open®ion=Article&module=Promotron
The type of isolation training I had was for airborne and droplet born diseases such as TB (airborne) and influenza (droplet born) and sterile techniques for surgery (and in some cases, post-surgical care). Caring for an Ebola patient requires much more stringent training and isolation gear because of the ways it can be transmitted – especially to the caregivers. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/13/read-this-to-get-a-better-understanding-of-how-ebola-spreads/
Most hospitals here in America have staff and personnel that are well trained in isolation and reverse isolation techniques; very few are rigorously trained for handling something like Ebola, which is expensive and time consuming.
Fortunately, it is very difficult to spread in a general population like ours, where we generally don’t come in contact with or handle the bodily fluids of people who are in the contagious stage of the disease. Hopefully, that and the general humbling of the CDC and hospitals across the country will have given us the time and incentive to get our collective medical act together and prevent a wider outbreak. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/15/us/changes-to-ebola-protection-worn-by-us-hospital-workers.html
There are a couple of other steps that people are talking about regarding the government – one taken and one not taken, yet.
The one taken – the appointment of an ebola “czar” to communicate and coordinate – has raised hackles because the President made a “political” rather than a medical appointment. Some wonder why he didn’t appoint a military superstar like Colin Powell or David Petraeus.
Most medical people that I’ve heard speak out about it feel that what we need isn’t another doctor, we have one heading the CDC, but someone who can organize and coordinate the various federal, state and local efforts here -medical and legislative – and then communicate that to the public.
As for the debate over a political organizer or a military superstar, well, I can’t help looking at the record of our military successes, lately, and the record of a guy who helped run two successful national political campaigns as far as expertise in communicating and coordinating – not to mention the difficulty of having to get something through our cantankerous Congress. It’s sort of a tossup, isn’t it? Just saying …
As to the step not yet taken – banning all flights from those West African countries where the Ebola epidemic is not contained – I tend to agree that it’s not a good idea. Psychologically, if I were trapped in one of those countries by such a ban, and I had the finances to travel, I’d steady be looking for another way out – car, bus, train, donkey cart, whatever – to another country and an air flight from there. And the worse the epidemic gets, the more people who are likely to be looking for such back-door ways to get somewhere else in order to come here.
Right now, countries where the epidemic is on going are checking people boarding flights out of those countries. And we are checking people from those countries when they get off of flights into the US, now, and keeping contact information on them and fellow travelers. The government was late in starting that, and it’s not a perfect system (as the case of Mr. Duncan shows,) but I’m not sure forcing a situation where people actively circumvent that system in numbers that could potentially overwhelm the medical systems in this country is any better.
Honestly, I think WHO is right. The best thing we could do to ensure our own safety, instead of obsessing over a handful of cases here or in Europe, is for the developed nations to work at stopping the epidemic over there. And the governments here and in the other developed countries have done a woefully inadequate job of that.
While we’ve been bitching and moaning over the President sending 3,000 troops to build hospitals, deliver supplies and train field workers – troops who will not be in contact with patients – Cuba, that tiny island of 11million people to our south that we love to hate, is sending almost 500 doctors and medical workers directly into combat in the affected countries. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/12/cuba-leads-fights-against-ebola-africa
We and the other countries of the developed world spent trillions of dollars bailing out TBTF banks, trillions fighting an everlasting war on terrorism, yet we gripe about a billion to stop what could turn out to be a much greater threat.
If you still think the elites are deliberately trying to cull the population via Ebola, go ahead on I guess. Maybe there’s enough information in the articles I’ve listed to help you get the right hazmats and handsoap to protect yourselves. Personally, I think you’d be better served buying a little extra hand sanitizer and, maybe, some face masks for the upcoming flu season and sending the rest to Doctors Without Borders, Samaritan’s Purse or any of the dozens of other non-profits that are over there in the nitty-gritty fighting the good fight without much help. After all, to misquote George Bush, isn’t it better to fight it over there, so we won’t have to fight it over here?
Besides, the elites/government/CDC/MIC can’t really afford to kill us right now. We’re part of those Great American Consumers whose urge to shop ’til we drop makes up 70% of the economy. So, why would they want to kill us now?
The Conflicted Doomer 
They have to save the Earth by reducing the number of energy consumers. CO2 emissions can only be reduced by reducing the demand. It’s all for the good of the Earth don’t you know. We got the endless economic growth crazies that will turn Earth into another Venus if they have their way. Let’s call them the Venusians. And we’ve got Clancy Committees that plan to save the Earth from the Venusians. I call them Clancy Committees in memory of Tom Clancy. His 1998 novel RAINBOW SIX had a subplot where a bunch of techie types with a biotech/pharmaceutical firm plan to start a scary pandemic. Then they will furnish the vaccine to stop the scary pandemic except that the real killer is in the vaccine. Of course they have the REAL vaccine so they will be spared and have the Earth to themselves. And of course, in the novel, Mr. Clark (the hero) whips up on the bad guys and their plan to depopulate the world. Now, we know that anyone can make up a story but the reason this one kind of stands out is that in Tom’s 1995 novel, DEBT OF HONOR, the finale is a 747 being flown into the US capitol with all the big explosion and fire that we would see six years later at the twin towers. Just a coincidence I guess.
If the billionaires were really concerned with maintaining the consumer economy they would be implementing policies that put more money into the consumers hands. Didn’t Henry Ford work that all out back when he paid his help enough that they could by a Model T? All the claims that the problem is greed or capitalism don’t stand up to the facts that economic policy has steadily reduced the consumers ability to consume. If it was truly greed, seems like they would put more money into this 70% of the economy and then get their cut from a bigger pie.
And these Clancy dudes need to act fast. The Venusians have got this global warming thing going over the top. Somehow the GHG emissions have got to stop. What choice do they have? If you were a billionaire would you stand by and let the Earth become uninhabitable? We’ve got plenty of past evidence of humans exterminating other humans. What did Europeans do to Native Americans? And on and on. What’s with all the panic over a virus when they’ve been loading the air, food, and water with toxins for the past fifty years. Those programs have already killed millions. But Ebola just has a magic sound to it.
Hi aubrey, guess you covered all the bases there. Sadly, for these folks,especially, perception is reality. From their perspective, the economy is recovering,(even though it’s not for most of us) so that perception is their reality. The US has the greatest healthcare system in the world, (even though we don’t for most of us) so that perception is their reality. Oil? We’ve got oodles of the stuff, (even though a lot of what EIA passes off as oil isn’t, what we mostly have now is difficult and expensive to get at and we have to keep drilling new wells because the effective life of a fracked well is less than 5 years instead of the decades long life of a conventional well). Climate change? We have techno-fixes for that if it gets too bad, (even though they only postpone the worst effects and may do more harm than good.) Over population? Hey, growing economies need growing customer bases. Etc., etc., etc.
I think (hope) that with the case of Mr. Duncan, especially after two of his nurses came down with Ebola, and especially after the CDC allowed the second one to travel on a commercial airline (or two) with a fever of 99.8 (with possible exposure to almost 500 people) because their perception was that fever under 101 wasn’t dangerous to others, REALity suddenly gave them a kick in the gut and changed their perception.
And one by one, REALity will intrude on each of these as the Empire continues its decline. Soon perhaps, but not yet. They’re still too deluded, I think. At least, that’s what I see.
Nice to hear from you; hope you’ll post again.
I’ve been trying to figure out this “perception is reality” thing for years. We’re looking for the truth but how do we know the truth when we find it? Is there only one truth? My “form follows function” mind has generated this possibility. I have previously posted a similar story about the subvarients on Prosperous Way Down. All the elements of this current Mass Extinction, the 6th in the last 500 million years, are the result of the Perception is Reality subvarient.
We think of humans as one species. If we consider functionality, then we might divide humans into two Homo sapiens subvarients. I call them “Homo sapiens empirico” and “Homo sapiens politico”.
Empirico, the earlier form, survived primarily through their skill in observing their environment and making the successful response to those observations. It was a disadvantage to use wishful thinking. To recognize whether a track in the dirt was predator or prey could only benefit if the “hope” is left out of the equation.
The truth was what was right before their eyes.
As the population grew and villages became towns and towns became cities and monarchies became established another skill developed. In these population dense situations it became advantageous to observe the other humans. It became vital to be able to recognize the pecking order in the
group. The truth became whatever the king said it was. Over time we might
imagine that there was a selection against any empirical observation capability that might
inhibits one’s ability to project support of the ruling elite. There was also true genetic engineering. Today, they present GMO crops as being genetically engineered when it appears to be more of an experiment. Engineering not experimentation, it is the application of known values to a problem. Such as we know the tensile strength of steel so we can generate the size of the beam to fit our load and span. Peasants that did not subjugate with a smile had their genes removed for the gene pool. It’s a known value that someone with their head cut off will not breed again. That is genetic engineering,
These two subvarient lines are mixed in our present population with the Politico
strain being expressed strongly in our policy makers and administrators. These
people are incapable of empirical observation. They are incapable of seeing
what is right before their eyes. They don’t see the weather. They don’t see the
forest and they don’t see the trees. They don’t differentiate between science
and science styled marketing. They make their living by supporting the owners
no matter what the owners present as truth.
We are in the grips of the Pain and Death Industrial Complex that has probably killed more people than Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin put together, and we pay them to kill us. I know this sounds really wacky, so read CONFESSIONS of a MEDICAL HERITIC by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn. He was a Pediatrician and served on the Medical Licensing Board for the State of Illinois. Dr. Mendelsohn states that 90% of the actions taken by modern medical practitioners is unnecessary and that much of it is harmful. He thought there was too much vaccination going on back in the seventies. Ninety per cent of what doctors do is fraud and now we have a government mandate that we have to submit. Dr. Mendelsohn presents modern medicine as a religion. The high priests (doctors) can give us a drug that (oops) kills us but the perception is that we had a bad reaction.
All that aside, the weather is gorgeous and I got about half my lettuce bed planted this weekend. I have an unheated hoop house that grows lettuce all winter. I don’t know about all that stuff on the radio and computer, but the lettuce is real.
Who was it that said something about, if you repeat a lie with certainly enough times, people will believe it’s true?
I think your last sentence here was exactly where we are right now. ” I have an unheated hoop house that grows lettuce all winter. I don’t know about all that stuff on the radio and computer, but the lettuce is real.”
Exactly. 😀
Good post. I think that most large-scale efforts to control the disease here in the US are not only ineffective, but also undesirable. See: Foucault on quarantine and panopticon.
Hi herc, yes, I agree. But I think the most dangerous thing is the certainty that we (meaning mostly the CDC) knew exactly what to do and how to do it with this infection. I do think they had a “come to Jesus” moment, though, with the second nurse who got infected.
Was just watching this talk by Dr. Michael Osterholm, who has been around and working with infectious diseases for a long time:
Dang, Linda, even your et ceteras are reproducing. As far as the Clancy story of having the real vaccine, my experience is that in fifty/fifty propositions chances are there will be a major mistake. They would have given the good vaccine to the people and taken the ‘bad’ vaccine themselves. Call it Karma.
As to Foucault, I only know of the pendulum, heh.
LOL grave, I did get a little carried away, didn’t I? I’ve never read Foucault, but I have read about some of his work. If I remember right, his work on panopticon (widespread state surveillance?) came out of research he did on citywide quarantines during the plague. Not sure that’s a good synopsis of it, but maybe Herc has a better one.
That was an excellent Osterholm presentation, and worrying. “The virus is in control right now and we have to understand that.”
Yeah, it was worrying. There was an article in Reuters back in April, when the epidemic was just getting started in W. Africa http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/17/us-guinea-ebola-idUKBREA3G11W20140417 that said that the virus was not the Zaire virus, but was only 97% genetically identical. How much of a difference might that 3% make?
For example, what if part of that difference was in the length of the incubation period before symptoms presented and lab results were positive? Say, 31 days instead of 21?
Now wouldn’t that be scary? Especially if we’re treating it as if it acted much like the Zaire virus which we’re pretty familiar with.
That’s the sort of thing I think Osterholm is worried about when he says we think we are in control of the virus when it’s the virus that’s in control.
Even though we’ve been studying viruses for over 100 years, there are always new viruses or new versions of older ones popping up somewhere that we might not understand completely yet.