The Deadly Stupidities Around Ebola | Hacker News Reader

The Deadly Stupidities Around Ebola

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11 pointsColinCochrane13 comments

I can appreciate your frustration, but when you look at the history of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or read a book like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" the distrust becomes more understandable. As per the RFS biotec comments (http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/), and given the expressed intent of certain groups to develop the ability to annihilate entire ethnic groups, the fears are not unfounded. Consider how many still fervantly endorse Darwinism. Consider this quote from his popular book (the title of which is often truncated):

"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Quoting that without the historical follow-up (namely, the experience of eugenics in the first half of the 20th Century, culminating in the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany, which is widely regarded as one of the most shameful chapters in human history) is dishonest to say the least. Many great thinkers made errors in their thinking. You can take the good without taking the bad - and you certainly know that.

It took longer than that for the lesson to sink in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization

And it hasn't completely stopped.

Very true...I've read quite a few new reports about it recently, particularly in prisons. I've also met and interviewed women who were given unnecessary hysterectomies. In one case, the woman saw her doctor on a news program saying that unmarried Black women should be sterilized. She immediately drove to his office and found it abandoned.

The most awful ethical decisions in the Tuskegee syphilis study - repeatedly withholding a treatment that was by then known to be both effective and lifesaving and preventing the patients from accessing treatment programs that offered it - all happened after the actions of the Nazis were widely known and abhorred. The study continued for decades after the Nazis were defeated and we'd supposedly learned from the horrors they committed.

Dishonest? I don't follow...much could be said about the rhetoric of eugenics leading up to and including the HHolocaust. Eugenics was merely a psuedu-scientific argument for sentiments that already existed. If I had continued yo elaborate on the topic, quotes by Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) on "Blacks and Jews" among others would follow. It might be noted that 16 million Black offspring have been aborted since Roe Vs Wade and that abortion is the 2nd leading cause of death in the Black community - more than cancer and heart disease combined. But that would deviate from the topic of distrust surrounding Ebola.

To Darwin's defense, he goes into depth about problems with his theory within the final chapters of the text and I have considered his wording and the quote I gave in context of his experience traveling with a slaver as well as the social-economic-political environment he was beholden to, and take it as a warning of what was to come.

Here comes another drop in my HN points.

The simple truth is that there is no explanation of how the Zaire variant of Ebola arrived in West Africa, travelling over a 1500 miles without any outbreaks between.

Last time I checked not a single animal, bat or otherwise, in the area of the outbreak has been found infected the Ebola virus since the beginning of the outbreak. There is simply no evidence of Ebola having been transmitted from an animal to a human being in West Africa or Central Africa for the 40 years the virus has been known, yet the media runs on and on about 'bush meat' (which is a derogatory term for meat obtained by hunting or trapping), deforestation and other nonsensical theories about how Ebola emerged there.

Coming to the term 'bush meat' when a Westerner hunts deer, ducks or grouse is it called 'bush meat'? This only shows the kind of snide, racist, innuendo towards Africa and really hints an agenda to manufacture an unsubstantiated source of Ebola in the mind of uninformed Westerners.

Shouldn't science be based on hard evidence rather than speculation? Ebola so far has been transmitted from human to human, meaning that a human must be the original source of Ebola. This is what science is supposed to mean, based on facts and evidence. So it raises the question who is patient zero, and how and where did they get and infected?

Prior to any outbreak the only places where Ebola can be found is in drug manufacturers and other biological laboratories, so why the surprise at conspiracy theories?

Then again there comes another question? Why Africa?

The amount of unexplored Amazonian rainforest is way larger than that in West Africa, why haven't any Ebola style outbreaks occurred there, or in areas like Indonesia, New Guinea and Malaysia?

Claims which cause people to avoid sources of treatment are not helpful in these circumstances, but with so called foreign assistance being the source of cholera in Haiti, which should anyone be surprised at conspiracy theories?

And therefore it must be because the US did something, right ?

There are strains from the phillipines and virginia. Check Wikipedia.

Umm, and why exactly does the Delaware State University tolerate this sort of behaviour? It's unconscionable that they don't fire this ass-hat immediately, for causing thousands of unnecessary deaths through idiocy.

What Broderick has written is irresponsible and deadly. His bio [1] says he's an Associate Professor with tenure. Firing him for an opinion piece will most likely be a long drawn out process. As with free speech protections, academic freedom has its trade-offs, because there are certainly some dangerous idiots in universities.

[1] http://www.desu.edu/sites/default/files/cbroderick.pdf

Have you studied the evidence he uses to support his claims before calling for his dismissal?

I suppose you don't realize that his being fired will only cause the reasons for his claim to be studied more carefully and even strengthen the case he is making.

Have you read his piece? It's a random mishmash of accusations and conspiracy theory. It doesn't have anything to do with his field of expertise nor does he seem to have any reason to have special knowledge of the things he claims. The only thing he mentions that could be investigated to see if it has a connection is a clinical trial in January for Ebola treatment (NCT02041715) that seems to immediately predate the epidemic.

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