Someone I know has recently postulated that ebola is in fact the much-dreaded zombie virus popularized in science fiction. He says that people with ebola are the walking dead, and goes on to state that the virus controls people, driving them to get to a populated area before they die in order to allow the virus to infect as many people as possible. As an example, he gives the 30,000 or so people from Sierra Leone who have recently crossed the border into Guinea following the lockdown in Sierra Leone. He believes that all of these 30,000 people are already infected and will now be able to infect hundreds of thousands more people, leading to the eventual outcome of the entire continent becoming infected and eventually succumbing to the disease.
He goes on to state that he has “insider knowledge” that the US troops being deployed to West Africa are part of a larger international strike force spearheaded by WHO. This strike force is determined to stop the spread of Ebola throughout the continent and has thus been accumulating multiple 20-kiloton hydrogen bombs. The entirety of West Africa will be methodologically targeted by these bombs, leaving no life forms of any sort alive, and thus finally eradicating ebola.
I know this person is a conspiracy theorist, and always believes some crazy thing or another is about to happen. I’ve tried getting him to see reason about other issues in the past and have pretty much given up all hope of ever changing his mind on anything. I don’t put any more credence into this theory than I did for the one where he said he had insider information that the US was going to use Russian troops to declare martial law to enforce Obamacare, but this sort of got me thinking about just what the global reaction would be if we were to annihilate tens or even hundreds of millions of people to stop the virus. I imagine it would lead to a complete breakdown of civilization, with many countries forced to declare martial law in an attempt to control citizens unwilling to trust a government that thought killing off everyone and everything throughout West Africa was a justified response to ebola.
I’m curious as to what others think the global response to this would be.
I have thought about this. I don’t think the spread of ebola is bad enough to warrant genocide. If in fact an air borne disease that was much more easily spread with a mortality rate similar to ebola I imagine the talking heads might have some kind of genocide plan on the table. It is hard to imagine the civilized world going along with this but fear is a powerful motivator.
Your friends views are not accurate, to say the least.
I would imagine if the US killed millions for no reason, we’d immediately be considered a roague nation and most likely someone would nuke us before we could do any more damage to the planet.
Multistage (fusion or “hydrogen”) nuclear weapons have a much greater yield than 20 kt, which is about the size of the weapon used on Hiroshima. Nuking a country would not be a good way of eradicating a disease, and in fact could potentially esacerbate the spread as refuges flee the affected areas without adequate hygiene, medical supplies, or food, and potentially compromised immune systems due to radiation poisoning. Ebola, due to its virulence, will naturally burn itself out and as long as reasonable measrures are made to identify and control vectors spreading to a global pandemic via any natural means is virtually impossible. Given that it has no natural host within which to benignly gestate outside of Africa means even an escape can’t survive long.
Influenza, on the other hand, is well-adapted to human beings. Many variants can also survive in livestock and can become airborne or easily spread by exhausted fluids and caried from person-to-person via fomites, allowing it to persist in proximity to human populations around the globe. It only takes a slight mutation for many strains of influenza to go from mild annoyance to high lethality. It was a much bigger killer in the Spanish-American war than any armed conflict, and it is entirely possible for it to spread fast enough, if not identified, to affect widely dispersed populations.
It would certainly give Putin the justification he needs (if any) to further ramp up the saber rattling, and the US and any allies that remained with it would have irrevocably lost the moral high ground.
Before genocide I’d expect a continent-scale quarantine. No aircraft or ships in or out. And serious “shoot everything on sight” orders at the land bridge into Asia. Stopping ship or air traffic across the Atlantic or Indian oceans would be pretty easy. There’d be plenty of time to locate and direct a kill vehicle to the target.
Stopping stuff crossing the Med would be harder since the distances are short & so the transit time is also short. OTOH, it’s also a much smaller area to patrol and you could also decide to close the space to any intra-Europe or intra-Asia traffic too. So the rules of engagement become easy: If it’s man-made, destroy it.
The vast majority of Africans could survive such a quarantine, provided their countries also got fairly serious about killing any refugees from infected areas. So while the adverse effects would certainly be concentrated on Africa and Africans, it’d be a stretch to call the motivation or the outcome genocidal. It would certainly be far from the generous spirit of mutual aid embodied in Medecins Sans Frontieres, the UN, the Red Cross, etc.
But if things get bad enough there it would be sort of the equivalent of a tourniquet: sacrifice the limb, save the body.
In the real world it won’t happen mostly because by the time it was obvious that Ebola was an airborne threat to the rest of the planet, it’d already be on the loose in Europe, India, the US & perhaps China. Even if it first went airborne-transmissible someplace in Africa and was detected there promptly, it’d probably jump the oceanic firebreak before the First World could decide to enact a quarantine and then get it up & running.
Look into the history of smallpox. Encircling an area with active smallpox and preventing anyone from coming out was a common technique. When vaccination became possible the strategy was to encircle, then vaccinate from the outer ring towards the interior.
In some cases the people inside the affected zone were basically written off - if they could survive on their own, great, but outside aid, beyond leaving food on the borders of the quarantine zone, was not given. The same was done at times for the black plague. It’s harsh, but it can and does work.
Thermometers just tell you who is and isn’t running a fever. Telephones let you communicate with those inside a quarantine zone, but so does a chalkboard set up 10 feet (or whatever) from the edge of such a zone.
If things get bad enough we’d bring back such quarantines. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Meanwhile, biohazard suits and modern medical equipment and technology means we don’t have to be do draconian. Usually.
Bravo, indeed!
You have no idea how tempted I am to say this to him. I feel a bit sorry for him, though, as his conspiracy theories have driven away all the rest of the family. Crazy as it sounds, this is nowhere near the most bizarre thing he’s thought of.
Great, my normal temperature runs 94-95F … by the time I am warm enough to be considered dangerous I can have infected tons of people!:D:dubious::smack:
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The question is so absurd as not to warrant a serious response. Nuclear weapons as a sterilizing agent of last resort are the product of Hollywood movies.
So your friend thinks it plausible that the US would nuke a majority-Muslim country like Sierra Leone, thus actually deserving the ‘Great Satan’ label? Presumably this is to ramp up the division with the Muslim world, lining the pockets of the Illuminati’s Military-Industrial cash cow? Ingenious!
