According to a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Laurie Garrett, “Travel bans would [not] keep Ebola from spreading in the United States.”
If this is basically the official policy of the CFR, it is not surprising that the Obama administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concur, claiming that travel bans would not only fail to contain the Ebola outbreak, but would actually worsen the crisis.
Since its inception, American foreign policy has essentially followed the dictates of CFR policy; since the creation of the CFR Round Table, basically every department of the United States government has been inordinately comprised of CFR members. Of current notability with regard to Ebola policy are CFR members Thomas R. Frieden, the Director of the CDC, and Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, who sat on the Board of Directors for the CFR.
Burwell also served as both the Chief Operating Officer and President of the Global Development Program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has contributed “generous” financial grants to the CFR for “Global Health Policy Studies.” The Foundation has also poured $50 million into “the development of therapies, vaccines, and diagnostics” to combat Ebola, and it has recently partnered with Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., the creators of the experimental Ebola drug, ZMapp. These conflict-of-interest ties between American policymakers and bureaucrats, CFR agents, the Gates Foundation, and Big Pharma raise further questions as to the motives behind American government officials refusing to ban flights from West African countries where Ebola has become an epidemic.
In particular, it is obvious that, in the event of a global Ebola pandemic, profits can be amassed from the sales of Ebola vaccines and ZMapp prescriptions amongst other “therapies . . . and diagnostics.” Is it hence possible that there is a concerted effort to allow Ebola to spread until the treatment market has grown to be satisfactorily lucrative? As Black Agenda Report columnist, Margaret Kimberly, points out in her critique of Gates’ philanthropic attempts to fight Ebola:
“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may appear to be a savior when it provides $300 million to the WHO budget, but those dollars come with strings attached. WHO director general Dr. Margaret Chan admitted as much when she said, ‘My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests.’ Instead of being on the front line when a communicable disease crisis appears, it spends its time administering what Gates and his team have determined is best.”
Indeed, what has the Gates team deemed to be best? Biosecurity? Profits? Or something even more sinister, like Malthusian-eugenic population control? Perhaps all three.
If Ebola becomes a global pandemic, the initial consequence would of course be a certain bio-insecurity. But this bio-insecurity catastrophe would justify Laurie Garrett’s call for amped up biosecurity powers at the level of international governance; in a Foreign Affairs piece entitled “Biology’s Brave New World,” Garret states that “[i]t is in the United States’ own interests, as well as those of other countries, to have a thriving global epidemiological response capability housed within the WHO, acting under the provisions of the International Health Regulations.” Such a “global epidemiological response” task force could then roll out the highly profitable vaccines and pharmaceuticals. In the meantime, people will be dying off in record numbers, and the human population will be reduced, thus helping to fulfill Gates’ overpopulation control philanthropies for “slow[ing] the growth of the world’s population.”
Let us pray to God that such a scenario never takes place.
John Klyczek has an MA in English and is a college English instructor, concentrating on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, “Brave New World.”
