My Opinion of the Ebola Epidemic

[Red Cosmonaut]

As many of you may know, there is an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. It has spread to several countries in Africa and the US and Spain because of aid workers and people seeking treatment. This is cause for nations to block off travel (except for humanitarian reasons) to the effected region. This is also a time that Socialized Medicine must be implemented in the USA. If this disease spreads then the USA will be forced but, it may be too late when it gets there and starts to spread. In situations like this, the working class must be protected and not just by getting them medical care, but stopping the big Pharma corporations from exploiting the gullible minds of the public. I bet you that when this starts to spread more big companies will start to make profits with fake drugs and fake products to make money off of people's fear. When sickness comes Capitalism will take advantage of it and to me that is immoral. What is probably going through the mind of every big Pharmaceutical company CEO or president is: "How can I exploit the people's fears to make money off this Ebola thing?". Comrades, we must stop Capitalism. We see this in every major disaster. This Cannot and will not continue.

- John

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I believe that all the big nations must block off travel to these West African nations to prevent the spread of the disease.

Save white people at all costs!!

[Magón]

Blocking travel = easier said than done. There will always be someone, or a group, to fuck that plan up, when you think it's working.

Honestly, this has got to be a joke thread.

[ℂᵒиѕẗяᵤкт]

You realize that, even though there's no cure for ebola, it can be successfully treated, right? Advanced industrial countries are far and away more likely to have access to the means of effective treatment than countries in West Africa are, and quarantine is pretty damn effective in preventing the spread (by which I mean quarantine in a hospital room, not in a continent with the intent to protect white people).

In fact, I'm friends with someone in the Peace Corps who contracted Ebola while treating it in Africa, was treated for it until he was healthy again, and went right back to treating people with Ebola.

It seems like actually treating Ebola is a much more effective measure of stamping out the epidemic than keeping West Africans in an open-air prison to die.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As many of you may know, there is an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. It has spread to several countries in Africa and the US and Spain because of aid workers and people seeking treatment. I believe that all the big nations must block off travel to these West African nations to prevent the spread of the disease. This is also a time that Socialized Medicine must be implemented in the USA. If this disease spreads then the USA will be forced but, it may be too late when it gets there and starts to spread. In situations like this, the working class must be protected and not just by getting them medical care, but stopping the big Pharma corporations from exploiting the gullible minds of the public. I bet you that when this starts to spread more big companies will start to make profits with fake drugs and fake products to make money off of people's fear. When sickness comes Capitalism will take advantage of it and to me that is immoral. What is probably going through the mind of every big Pharmaceutical company CEO or president is: "How can I exploit the people's fears to make money off this Ebola thing?". Comrades, we must stop Capitalism. We see this in every major disaster. This Cannot and will not continue.

- John

Why would you focus on the USA instead of, you know, the neo-colonies where people are dying daily, due to a deadly combination of the Ebola virus and imperialism? I would recommend a recent Workers' Vanguard article (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/) for an overview of the situation, and what American and EU "humanitarian aid" amounts to.

[Red Cosmonaut]

I mainly focused on the United States mainly because it is where I live and this was more of a US Domestic politics post. Also, if the US had an Ebola epidemic that would be extremely catastrophic! Not just for the US but, the amount of travelers that go to and from the US would spread the disease further. I am not saying I support the US or anything I am only looking at the big picture of what could happen.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The US is much better suited to Liberia and Sierra Leone at setting up quarantines and dealing with outbreaks within its borders. It's a very lethal disease, but it's not as contagious as people are making it out to be. This is being whipped up by a press which loves to get people whipped up into some kind of hysteria (not out of nefarious design but out of profit).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

yesssss let's make political capital out of a disease that is killing thousands of people in the developing world!

:rolleyes:

[Creative Destruction]

This is cause for nations to block off travel (except for humanitarian reasons) to the effected region.

http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Youre-Entitled-To-Your-Wrong-Opinion-Reaction-Gif.gif

[Ocean Seal]

Blocking off travel == increased distrust of government == harder to contain pandemic within country
Basically if you block off travel you are essentially saying its fine for people in the area to die to protect people who would have a much easier time taking medical care of themselves.

[Ocean Seal]

Blocking off travel == increased distrust of government == harder to contain pandemic within country
Basically if you block off travel you are essentially saying its fine for people in the area to die to protect people who would have a much easier time taking medical care of themselves.

[RedWorker]

In the chance (however less likely it may be in a first world country) that there is an Ebola outbreak in other continents, though, wouldn't that make the disease much more threatening to the human species? Having a disease limited to one small region is better than having it everywhere. And no, I'm not saying locking the borders is right, I'm not talking about any measure here because I'm not even qualified to in the first place.

[Remus Bleys]

It is sometimes good to have opinions but really opinions are just facts. "Green is my favorite color" is not an opinion, it is a fact - for your personal definition of "favorite," green fits the bill. "Green is the best color" is also a fact, true or false depending on the criteria of "favorite". There can be perspective differences when it comes to more complex things, but even then truth is changed and morphed to fit whatever agenda, sometimes not - sometimes the agenda is correct.

Nobody cares about your opinion, your thoughts, or your perspective, John. Kill the individual and rescue the human. It is wrong to say that there is no special snowflakes, as we are all individual snowflakes, special and unique. But who the fuck cares about snowflakes, when we must be snowballs (an imperfect analogy, like all, as quantity doesn't really matter, but rather, social forces do).

[Red Commissar]

You pontificate about how capitalism is fucking over people but then make a bizarre call to basically quarantine a whole region of the world and leave the people there to get destroyed by the disease. Truly you are presenting a morale alternative to the wingnuts stateside who're calling for the same thing.

If we even want to float this you'd have to consider that borders were already basically shut down in West African nations, and the disease still spread out of Guinea to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

I don't really see what's going on in West Africa as a consequence or effect of abuses by pharmaceutical companies, much less manipulation of it for their own gain. If you wanted to make a better stand on the issue you should've highlighted say the civil wars, IMF-imposed restructuring and privitization, corrupt politicians, business running rumsod over the region for profit, etc. rather than quackery.

Even then, I should point out that Nigeria, mired in its own mess of economic inequity, business-government collusion and corruption, and a nutbag insurgency in the north, has managed to keep incidents of the disease from going out of control. It's a sharp contrast to what happened in the heart of the epidemic and Nigeria's a major hub of travel and trade as well in the region- of course they had a lot of warning ahead of time but it's manageable.

If anything blocking the countries off, even just for travel, would further mire their economies into a quagmire and make things much worse. People will be all the more desperate the get the hell out of those countries to live- I don't just mean those who are sick but those who are not and still need to provide for themselves and others.


I mainly focused on the United States mainly because it is where I live and this was more of a US Domestic politics post. Also, if the US had an Ebola epidemic that would be extremely catastrophic! Not just for the US but, the amount of travelers that go to and from the US would spread the disease further. I am not saying I support the US or anything I am only looking at the big picture of what could happen.

Compared to other pathogens ebola actually ranks quite low on the ability to transmit from one person to another. The media and public imagination is running away with this because of the disease's lethality but frankly it's not the doom virus that will end the world.

I live maybe 10 minutes from the Texas Presbytarian hospital where Mr. Duncan died and now another nurse has been infected, but frankly it's not all that concerning to me. The media is really blowing this out of proporition especially after what happened to the young nurse but we'll see that this really isn't a disease that is hard to track like a flu outbreak.

If you want something like that we'd have to wait for another big flu pandemic ala 1918-1919 (we may be due for a similar one this century if previous trends hold up) or a particularly nasty strain of coronavirus- basically something that can be both airborne and be able to transmit to many people at once before the person even manifests any symptoms, potentially to dozens of other people who'll inturn do the same thing. Conversely Ebola transmits by bodily fluids, and as such can only be transmitted once symptoms reach that stage of hemorrhaging.

Just for context the aformentioned Flu panemic in 1918-1919 infected millions of people and is believed to've killed at the very least 50 million people. That's more than even WWI killed- a very recent event then.

[Illegalitarian]

I don't really see what's going on in West Africa as a consequence or effect of abuses by pharmaceutical companies, much less manipulation of it for their own gain. If you wanted to make a better stand on the issue you should've highlighted say the civil wars, IMF-imposed restructuring and privitization, corrupt politicians, business running rumsod over the region for profit, etc. rather than quackery.


You're correct in every sense of the word, but it's also a consequence of abuses by pharmaceutical companies.

Pharmaceutical companies are businesses and businesses exist to make profit above all else, and the biggest indicator in a market economy of what needs to be reproduced is what is being consumed, and how much of it. If a business produces a product that is not consumed too much, it become unprofitable to continue said production, thus the product is either no longer made or sold scarcely.

Pharma operates in the exact same way, which is one of the big reasons vaccine and antibiotic production and, worst of all, research, is in such a huge decline and is the reason shortages of basic vaccines and antibiotics have become rampant and widespread that the CDC has a public website that tracks shortages and layovers.


All of the money is in treatment.. asthma medicine, insulin, etc etc, why bother with a product people are only going to need once or twice in their lifetime? Why conduct research on a cure for a disease that's only really going to affect the poorest part of the earth? What's the incentive?

This is where the social dems and Marxist-Leninists would suggest nationalization I suppose, and I tend to agree as a short-term solution (remember, it was US and Canadian government-subsidized research and production as well as the government itself that produced the agent that cured the disease in the people who were brought to the US for treatment a while back).


What sets Liberia apart from Nigeria is rotten luck more than anything, in my opinion.

Neoliberal structural adjustments imposed by western governments and IMF/World Bank type organizations usually end up cutting industries a lot of slack by opening up their environmental protection laws, and the more natural environment that gets fucked over, the closer proximity animals are forced to live to humans. As we know, monkeys are the biggest non-human carries of Ebola, so forcing them into situations where they become such a common sight to the average person to the point where it doesn't take much to catch and eat them, or to keep them as pets, is of course going to inevitably lead to something like this, the same reason I believe the HIV-AIDS epidemic struck Africa.

Nigeria is more or less owned by western oil companies so their rivers and forests are just as fucked, but I think, for whatever reason, this has not changed people's attitudes towards wildlife, or perhaps there just isn't as many carrier monkeys in Nigeria for whatever reason.

Either way, it's the existence of pharmaceutical research and production as a business and neoliberal austerity programs and structural adjustments imposed by the west that is fueling this epidemic above all else.