DOD funding is very common if you are working on a bug that could affect the US military. The military is concerned that they could one day face a military threat in an area with Ebola. For that reason, they are very interested in a treatment. Ebola amid war would be truly devastating. There is no cloak and dagger here.
Mapp is working with USAMRIID because they are are of the only groups capable of conducting animal experiments with Ebola. If you want to test an Ebola treatment, you pretty much have to collaborate with USAMRIID. Again, there’s nothing suspicious about this group, though I’m sure that will do little to stop all of the conspiracy theorists.
There are practical reasons for holding new therapies close to the chest on the part of both the developer (trade protection until commercial production is practical) and health authorities (putative “ethical” considerations along with being careful not to generate too much hoopla for a treatment which may fail, or worse–be highly successful but not available to the masses). To be fair, it’s much easier to give a totally experimental and untested treatment to a highly trained scientist than to an unschooled polloi because the consent issue is more easily addressed.
But mostly, hyperbole like “Top Secret” in this instance is in the same genre as this one old secret trick for curing baldness invented by a single Mom in Timbuktu that enrages doctors everywhere.
Yup. And how you aren’t legally and ethically allowed to just hand that stuff out to everyone. The amount of bureaucracy involved to give it to just two people in pre-human-testing stages is mind-blowing (I’ve made a similar application to the FDA for a much less serious case, and that was when it had already progressed to phase II human testing).
Plus the DOD funds all kinds of stuff, not just directly military-related items. I get grant announcements from the DOD at least once a month, for funding opportunities for research related to stuff like PTSD, breast cancer, rehabilitative medicine, lung cancer, Gulf War illness, multiple sclerosis, etc.
I’m extremely wary of any claims out of Thailand. They’re always announcing this or that cure, then it doesn’t pan out and quietly disappears. I even recall a cure for Aids here back in the 1980s!