There’s another unsurprising front in the battle to contain the Ebola outbreak — the rash of conspiracy theories piling up as the deadly virus rages on. And they are bizarre.
There’s another unsurprising front in the battle to contain the Ebola outbreak — the rash of conspiracy theories piling up as the deadly virus rages on. And they are bizarre.
One of the latest comes from Phyllis Schlafly, who in an interview last week said President Barack Obama purposefully allowed Ebola to enter the United States so the country would be more like Africa. “Obama doesn’t want America to believe that we’re exceptional,” Schlafly said. “He wants us to be just like everybody else, and if Africa is suffering from Ebola, we ought to join the group and be suffering from it, too.”
Rush Limbaugh just days earlier said Obama welcomed Ebola here as payback for slavery, or something. It’s hard to connect the train of thought here, but the conservative commentator basically posits that the U.S. doesn’t have tighter travel restrictions because Liberia was founded by freed slaves, so there’s some kind of guilt factor.
Sadly, it’s not all that surprising that the political fringes try to exploit a major public health crisis. And you can always rely on the Internet to cook up its own conspiracies. For instance, did you hear that a 17-year-old episode of “The Simpsons” correctly predicted this Ebola outbreak?
Then there’s singer Chris Brown — not exactly a public health expert — who informed his Twitter followers recently that Ebola must be some kind of population control plot. Brown’s followers apparently convinced him of his own stupidity, as he later tweeted that it was time for him to shut up.
It’s easy to just shake your head and laugh off conspiracy theories, but it points to real fear and confusion around a virus that doesn’t have a cure and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. And the conspiracy theory drumbeat is a little scarier when it comes from people who would seem to carry some more legitimacy — like the Liberian-born U.S. professor who recently wrote in a Liberian newspaper that the Ebola outbreak was the result of U.S. bioterrorism experiments.
Public health workers trying to combat the outbreak already face a tough enough communication challenge. Sowing seeds of disbelief and fear only makes it more challenging to bring the Ebola outbreak under control.