By Chinweizu
Sundoor999@gmail.com
(21 October 2014)
As the spectre of Ebola stalks
the world, people everywhere are looking accusingly at the ECOWAS presidents.
Like the commandants from whose prison a jailbreak of very dangerous prisoners
has just happened, they had better have a damned good explanation of the event
or face court martial etc. The citizens of ECOWAS demand no less. How can these
presidents allow such a thing to happen on their watch and disgrace all
Africans? Aspersions of all sorts are
being cast on us as incompetent to manage our countries. Africa is being
demonized as this mysterious human backwater from which strange diseases emerge
to afflict the whole world. Before long it will be argued that Africa should be
re-colonized by the West to protect the whole world from the deadly
incompetence of its corrupt black misrulers. In the meantime, the economies of
ECOWAS countries are suffering. Their tourism sector has already been hit by
postponement and cancellation of conferences, group tours, private visits
etc. In farming villages economic
activities are being disrupted as the people flee for safety. And when the
entry bans being urged in the USA and elsewhere are imposed, there will also be
the cost of social disruption as family members, barred from entry into America
and Europe, cannot visit one another. Students back home on vacation may not be
able to return to their campuses abroad, nor will importers be able to make
quick trips abroad to buy and bring in goods.
Emergency trips abroad for treatment of other ailments will be affected.
Until the epidemic is ended, the economies of ECOWAS will be seriously hit and
the economic and social coats will keep mounting. And the epidemic can’t be
ended without knowing its causes and therefore the effective ways to combat
them. After all, if you don’t understand it you can’t fix it. I, as a concerned
ECOWAS citizen-- and I believe many other Africans would join me in
this--therefore demand an emergency ECOWAS Summit on Ebola at which the ECOWAS
presidents should set up a public and independent Commission of Enquiry comprising eminent international judges and jurists to investigate the
event and find answers to some pertinent questions:
---------------------------
On Feb. 18, 2006, I delivered a
public lecture at Muson Centre, Lagos, titled “Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the prospect of African power.” In it I mentioned a book, published in
1997, whose title should be the starting point of discussions on how to contain
and end the Ebola epidemic of 2014. It was Emerging
Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional? by Dr. Len Horowitz ,(Tetrahedron, LLC., 1997; ISBN:092355012-7;$29.95)
That title, from nearly twenty years ago, suggested that AIDS and Ebola may not be natural viruses, but lab-made viruses. For the purposes of investigating this Ebola epidemic, and until a better hypothesis is offered, let’s start with the hypothesis that this Ebola epidemic has been caused by a lab-made virus.
If
it is a lab-made virus, then how come it is now suddenly proliferating in West
Africa, in the Mano River basin countries (Liberia ,
Sierra Leone and Guinea )?
How many genetic engineering labs using recombinant technology are
there in those countries? Who operates them? That’s
where, in my view, the ECOWAS Presidents should begin their inquiries if they
want to protect their populations from this and similar virus epidemics in
future.
Here
are some of the pertinent questions to be put to the proposed ECOWAS Commission:
(1) Is
the Ebola virus natural or artificial, i.e. lab-made?
Logically,
it is either natural or artificial.
Here
is an editorial in The
Observer (London ), Sunday 5 October 2014, telling of the first death in this
epidemic:
“On 26 December 2013, a two-year-old boy
fell sick with a mysterious illness whose symptoms local people and medical
workers had never seen before. Within two days, the boy was dead.” “http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=30&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFUQFjAJOBQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2014%2Foct%2F05%2Fobserver-view-on-ebola-crisis-editorial&ei=H98yVIWjEIOTyQSQt4HwCQ&usg=AFQjCNEHH0GLQlIx6w0s5y18Id0FNYpFEg
This
suggests that it was not something previously known in the area. Hence it could
not have been naturally present or endemic in that ecosystem. If it were a
natural and therefore ancient member of the ecosystem of the Mano River basin ,
it would have manifested there long enough before now for the local population
to have developed some immunity to it and to have knowledge of it--as with
malaria. Ergo, it is a recent introduction to the area. And it is probably an
artificial virus.
(2) If
Ebola is a lab-made virus, who manufactures it?
(3) Is there any patent on the
Ebola virus? If so, who owns the patent?
(4) Who brought the virus to the Mano River Union
countries (Sierra Leone , Liberia and Guinea ) and in sufficient
quantities to infect so many as to have killed some 3000 in the ten months
since that first death in December 2013?
(5) Have any labs in those countries been working on
Ebola?
(6) If
yes, who set them up and who operates them?
(7) Where
precisely are they located?
(8) How
did the virus get from the labs to the village where the boy lived?
(9) Was
the escape to that village accidental or intentional?
Some
other intriguing questions that ECOWAS presidents should direct the Commission
to investigate include:
(10)
Is it true that researchers from Tulane
University , New Orleans , USA ,
have been operating in the area for about ten years under the leadership of one Dr. Robert Garry,
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane University
School of Medicine?
(11) Have they been conducting any
experimental treatments on citizens of the region (e.g., injecting monoclonal
antibodies)?
(12) What are the declared purposes of the Tulane University
research project?
(13) Do they include detecting the possible use of hemorrhagic
fever viruses as bioweapons?
(14)Have
they also been investigating the use of monoclonal antibodies as a treatment
for Lhasa fever
and other viral hemorrhagic fevers?
(15)If
so where? On-site in Africa or outside Africa ?
(16)What
treatments have such investigations produced for Ebola?
(17)Have
these treatments been made available to the Ebola victims in West
Africa ? And how soon after the epidemic began?
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