Helen Lauer [ 1 h 07 min 07 s | 30.73 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1208)

If there’s an Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Professor Helen Lauer hasn’t found it from her post at the University of Ghana. She does, however, see a fake crisis orchestrated to support vaccine testing on West Africans and a pretext for a U.S. invasion of the continent, and “How Positive Are You” is the first to break the story. HPAY co-hosts Elizabeth Ely and David Crowe first discuss the contradictions in the science as reported, then call up Prof. Lauer at the scene of the crime.

In a country where the leading cause of death in children through age 5 is illness caused by unsafe drinking water and prenatal malnutrition, such an “outside intervention” as the Ebola crisis places a burden on Ghana’s already overtaxed health care infrastructure, she says. And funding to address West Africa’s real public health issues is nearly impossible to obtain unless it is “piggybacked” on requests pegged to vaccination programs and Western-media-hyped epidemics.

Prof. Lauer alleges that high-level public health committees have revised Ebola statistics to support vaccine testing by GlaxoSmithKline. The reporting of these still less-than-impressive numbers has expertly pushed all the usual buttons of racism, contaminated blood fears and false notions about Africa. Finally, sending troops to deal with a public health crisis only reveals U.S. ambition toward establishing military bases there.

Says David: “Ebola is nothing like what it was in 1977 — this severe hemorrhagic disease.” The 1976 outbreak in Zaire was the source for the 1977 “isolate” paper, but he notes that an isolate of bodily fluids is not a viral “isolation.” “There’s really very little evidence that the people who are getting diagnosed with Ebola [today] really have the severe symptoms from before . . . [or] any symptoms that are in any way unique to Ebola,” he continues, noting that high fever and severe headache could also indicate tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera, malaria, or anemia — all common in that part of the world.

The laboratory test for Ebola infection uses the familiar “viral load” technology already debunked as an HIV diagnostic. And previous attempts at antibody testing have yielded high rates of false positives. (For those willing to exercise their own critical faculties on the raw research and propaganda, the Lancet page on Ebola contains many links.)

Hilarious yet tragic, reporting on this fake epidemic has gone from dumb to dumber, with even The New Yorker joking that someone can become “infected with Ebola misinformation through casual contact with cable news” while otherwise dutifully reporting the official line on Ebola. Even The Daily Show host Jon Stewart has tossed off a few punchlines.

All kidding aside, we call this fake crisis — created from the same template as “AIDS” — a moral outrage. To quote Heart of Darkness, the classic novella of Europeans madness in Africa: “The Horror!  The Horror!”

Helen Lauer is a full professor of philosophy at the University of Ghana and a member of the board of directors of Rethinking AIDS.

UPDATE: See our ‘XTRA’ posting featuring David Crowe’s further search for answers on Ebola on “The Infectious Myth.” It includes other useful links and updates as of October 30, 2014.