No, of course it didn't. But that's the front-page story - and most popular current post, as of this writing - on one of the major news sites in Liberia, a country that is about to see the worst of the current Ebola outbreak, if WHO's most recent estimates are accurate. Unlike the outbreaks in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the DPRC, etc. Liberia's has thwarted WHO's efforts at containment, leading the agency to suggest "non-conventional" means of intervention as a last resort in the face of impending disaster. On the heels of a desperate plea to the UN Security council, the United States and Britain are sending mobile hospital units to help absorb some of the brunt of the new wave of cases. It's looking to be a dire situation.
That a conspiracy theory about the origin and purpose of Ebola should be spreading through the country's mainstream media outlets is definitely not going to help things. It's true these rumors have been spreading for a while, but almost never with such a prominent platform.
There are a handful of reasons why this particular theory is getting aired at all:
1. Liberia in particular has been skeptical of the medical response to Ebola. As Pamela Scully at Reuters outlined last month, Liberians have been reeling in the aftermath of a brutal civil war, amid difficult inequalities and slum-like conditions in the capital city of Monrovia, and foreign experts who've been directing development in the country. That skepticism, fueled by inaccurate and conflicting government reports about the virus, has recently broken out into violence, with Ebola centers as primary targets. The U.S.-created-Ebola theory confirms already existing beliefs in foreign intervention and powerlessness.
2. Plus, it's not like the United States doesn't have a history of doing this exact thing using civilian treatments as cover for medical experimentation. Most of us know the Tuskegee experiment, but it was only a couple of years ago that we issued a formal apology for conducting syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s. The particular narrative at work here - the exploitation of developing nations by the United States government, in covert form - is a powerful and convincing one for people facing an outbreak of a virus that was not even identified as such until the mid-1970s, well within the lifetime of many Liberians. In fact, the debates online about the U.S.-created-Ebola theory keeps coming back to these arguments: if we know the U.S. has done this in the past, how can you discount their doing it in the present?
3. Bad research and conspiracy-mongering are easily disguised by titles and citations. The two main sources for Dr. Broderick's letter are an infamous 1990s book by Dr. (see below) Leonard Horowitz and an article on Global Research by Jon Rappaport. The Horowitz book, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola, is a cornerstone of the AIDS-denialist movement; the "Dr." that Horowitz claims is based on his work as a dentist, and his investigative work just gets crazier from here. Rappaport, like most of the writers who make Global Research their platform, isn't much better: an AIDS-denialist and anti-vaxxer as well who fancies himself an investigative journalist (On that note: why do I see so many people quote Global Research on this site? One of their top stories right now is claiming bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11. This is typical there.) Broderick himself studied plant pathology, which is a step up from dentist, but somewhat short of human virology.
But the most loathsome source cited is probably Yoichi Shimatsu, whose "The Ebola Breakout Coincided With UN Vaccine Campaigns" has been cross-posted to other African news websites. Don't even bother reading it: you know exactly what it says from the title. Not content to build fear and suspicion off attempts to curb the Ebola outbreak, Shimatsu is trying to take down vaccination efforts outright. (Shimatsu has been on a roll lately: he discovered that Israel downed both the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and their flight 17 in Ukraine. I'm not making this up.)
It's hard to call these men cynical vultures, because they probably believe the nonsense that they're peddling (which is even sadder, somehow). But there's no doubt they're doing damage to an already bad situation, and a situation that is on the verge of getting much, much worse over the next few weeks. And there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
I hate to end on such a down note, so at the very least, let's talk about what we can do. Do you have a favorite organization or charity that you've been supporting during the outbreak? Doctors without Borders have been doing their usual great work, and I'm especially happy with some of UNICEF's local partnership efforts (training civilians in awareness and prevention).