The Ebola Scare
We barely finished the Hantavirus scare before Ebola arrived on the scene, along with fears that it will spread far and wide.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
We barely finished the Hantavirus scare before Ebola arrived on the scene, along with fears that it will spread far and wide.
It’s a real virus and a wicked killer, to be sure. There is also zero chance that it can mutate into a pandemic. Why? It has a higher case fatality rate, one that actually limits its spread. A spreadable virus cannot kill its host. Only unsuccessful viruses do that.
That’s how the logic of these pathogens operates. There is a tradeoff between severity and prevalence. Incubation rates can adjust that dynamic somewhat but Ebola shows fast symptoms, which is why it is usually contained. That also makes contact tracing easier.
These days every infection that gets media attention generates public fear of both the medical and political response. What if they attempt another lockdown-until-vaccinate plot? We might swear not to comply but what if we are debanked, censored, and shamed?
In short, how powerful are the combined forces of media, public health officials, and governments? Is there anything we can do to stop them?
For all the world, it feels these days like someone is up to something. The World Health Organization never misses a chance to spread fear. The role of Brownstone Institute is to do the opposite: spread calm through logic, experience, and the actual science instead of the counterfeit form.
Have you made your plans to come to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for our annual conference and gala, November 6-7, 2026? It will likely sell out long before, so you might as well take advantage of early-bird pricing and get your hotel reservations now.
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We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.
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Here is some content since our last email.
Education Shrinkflation By Steve Templeton. In the normal, sane world of my childhood, this wouldn’t have been extraordinary. But this was November, 2022, and the world was just beginning to recover from the insanity of the Covid-19 response.
The Demonization of Men (and Everyone Else Too) By Thomas Harrington. While each of us are free to live by our own privately held theories regarding the actions taken by, or in the name of, Collective X or Collective Y, it is never right for the government to do so.
Inside the Great Vaccine Debate By Max Dublin. From the vaccine debate, we have learned that if government agencies truly want to promote the greater good, then best practice would be to take all of the differences among the various demographic groups in the population into consideration.
The Rise of the Meme Disease By Steven Kritz. I began to recognize that from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century, there were a series of illnesses that I initially referred to as ‘fad’ diseases. I now refer to these conditions as ‘meme’ diseases.
The News-to-Death Ratio Strikes Again By Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson. Diseases associated with poverty—those that are endemic, predictable, and devastating—often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instill fear in the right audience or in the right way.
Australia’s Bulwark against Populism Is Cracking By Rebekah Barnett. The right-wing populist wave that broke over much of the world in 2016 barely lapped at Australia’s shores. The nation’s compulsory, preferential voting system and homogeneous, middle-management style politics formed a bulwark against the tide. Now, that bulwark is starting to crack.
The Noble Savage By Sofia Karstens. This is not just a political or technological battle. It is a question of what it means to remain human. For those who choose integration, that is their right. But for those who do not, that must also remain a choice.
Medicine by Captivity: The Rise of the Hostage Physician By Joseph Varon. When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When throughput quietly shapes bedside decisions, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes.
The Biggest Breast Cancer Advance in the Last Twenty Years By Alan Cassels. Some clinicians and public-health researchers would argue that the media narrative minimizes known and proven downsides of these drugs, often trivializing or ignoring serious harms, including risks of stroke, blood clots, gallbladder disease, and increased breast cancer risk.
George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors By Jeffrey Tucker. George Washington’s terrible fate ought to have sounded a national alarm to ring through our long history. The lesson should be never to replace epistemic humility in medicine with institutionalized dogma. That lesson did not stick.
Political Psychiatry and the Genesis of the Trans Epidemic By Max Dublin. Unlike the scientists who fabricated the Covid-19 virus, those who introduced Gender Dysphoria to the world did not do so by altering an existing biological organism, nor did they discover anything that until that time had remained hidden in nature.
Don’t Be Locked Down By Brownstone Institute. Brownstone Institute’s work needs your support. So many institutions have failed over these six years but the work of Brownstone, that only you make possible, stands out for credibility, integrity, and effectiveness. In our times, your support is more important than ever.
AI and the Sublime By Bert Olivier. Think of ChatGPT, or Claude. How many millions of people consult them daily, talk to them, confide in them, ask them for advice, and so on, without reflecting on the undeniable fact that they are not human? They are transhuman.
Return of the Next Pandemic Script By Yaffa Shir-Raz. The question is whether the public and policymakers will rush to embrace this familiar script, or whether they have become more capable of recognizing how it is used to expand the power of institutions in which public trust has eroded.