What They Don't Want You to Know About Ebola. Three Big Things.

On surviving the next pandemic.

Wiki Commons/NIAID

You know what’s interesting?

Last February, Elon Musk “accidentally” cut Ebola prevention funding while leading his murder of tech bros on a rampage through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In his own words, “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” Remember that?

According to the news reports:

He grinned, smirked and laughed as he put his fingers up in air quotes around the word “accidentally.”

Now, with news of Ebola spreading fast through African countries, you’ve got to wonder. Did they actually restore the funding? Believe it or not, there’s an answer to that question, and the answer is no, they didn’t. A follow-up investigation by The Washington Post found that, wait for it…

Elon Musk was lying.

His DOGE team never restored the Ebola funding. USAID officials said, “Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments.” Even though the Trump administration granted a waiver, it was only on paper. The payments never went out, and “the teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled.”

That’s the first thing they don’t want you to know. And by “they,” I’m referring specifically to the Trump administration’s public health officials and the billionaires who helped elect them, including Musk. They don’t want you to know they’re likely responsible for the Ebola outbreak. If it winds up in the U.S., they’ll be responsible for that, too. They would hate for you to know that.

(So definitely don’t share this…)

Even after Musk stood in a room full of journalists, grinning about his snafu and promising everyone he’d already fixed it, statements were going out to healthcare workers in Africa that their contacts were canceled.

So, the U.S. has spent the last year ignoring Ebola, letting it spread without detection. Now we have a major Ebola outbreak.

How predictable…

It’s all over the news now, except for the important parts.

The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern over a recent outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. An American doctor has tested positive. Just over the last few days, cases and deaths have skyrocketed. Global health officials have reported that the actual numbers could be “much higher than reported.” Yes, that makes sense, because Elon Musk and his tech goons dismantled the teams and tools we would’ve used to track and contain exactly that kind of outbreak.

Even Trump says he’s concerned.

It gets worse.

The current outbreak concerns the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which we have no approved vaccine or treatments. The incubation period runs up to 21 days. During the first stages of illness, symptoms look very similar to a cold or flu. Patients can spread the disease once they’re symptomatic. In the past, doctors have misdiagnosed the early stages of Ebola. It’s hard to detect.

Experts are going on the news and insisting that Ebola only spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. There’s a big but here.

Here’s the second thing they don’t want you to know:

Ebola has airborne potential.

As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reports, the debate is far from settled. Some research shows that “airborne infectious particles are likely to play some role in transmission.” You really have to hand it to academics for phrasing bad news in the nicest way possible. Let’s translate that into plain English, shall we? Airborne particles can infect you with Ebola.

The article’s lead author is Michael T. Osterholm. He’s not a grifter. He’s not a mystic. He’s not someone who wants you to panic. He’s a legit scientist who works at the University of Minnesota.

In 2014, Osterholm wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times explaining the risk in simple terms for the general public, in plain English. There were two paths for the future of Ebola. Here’s the second one:

An Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next.

The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

In the research article, Osterholm and his team go on to say:

It is very likely that at least some degree of Ebola virus transmission currently occurs via infectious aerosols generated from the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract, or medical procedures, although this has been difficult to definitively demonstrate or rule out, since those exposed to infectious aerosols also are most likely to be in close proximity to and in direct contact with an infected case.

They also state that “Ebola viruses have the potential to evolve in the future into pathogens that spread mainly by the respiratory route,” especially if the virus is allowed to spread and mutate. Topping it all off, the researchers also found evidence of Ebola “superspreader” patients, and that Ebola has an incredibly low “infectious dose.” It takes as few as 10 particles to infect you.

So, there you have it.

Ebola viruses can already spread via the air to some extent. They’re undergoing hypermutation. They’re spreading faster than they have at any point over the last thousand years. They have the potential to become truly airborne, like the flu or other respiratory diseases. And the richest country on earth just recently killed all funding to deal with this mounting threat. The head of WHO has explained the outbreaks we’re seeing as a direct result of these cuts.

It’s just perfect that Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, gold member of the Epstein class, a man who espouses eugenics at every turn, the man building data centers and pushing AI like there’s no tomorrow, has also poised us on the cliff of another pandemic. Working with the CDC, USAID played “a key role in flagging outbreaks of unidentified diseases.” Under normal circumstances, the CDC and USAID worked together, responding to these disasters. They didn’t always get everything right. Now, that system doesn’t even exist. While Musk was destroying USAID, RFK Jr. was dismantling the CDC with deep cuts, layoffs, and purges. I guess he was too busy spreading measles to care about Ebola.

Where does that leave us?

Well, we’ve never been less prepared for a pandemic.

And yet, you don’t need to freak out over this news. That’s not the point. The point is something some of us have made over and over again, ever since we became aware of groundbreaking research on diseases and aerosol science over the last few years. Contrary to conventional knowledge, many viruses can spread through the air. If we allow them to spread, they can mutate. They can evolve. They can gain functions. They develop new ways to infect. They develop the ability to enter new hosts and become more efficient. That’s what viruses do.

That’s what Osterholm is talking about.

Osterholm’s research on Ebola’s airborne potential goes back to 2015, years before the leap forward in aerosol science led by Linsey Marr, who won a MacArthur genius grant for her pioneering work. She changed how we think about disease transmission, but there’s still a lot of resistance. That’s not surprising, either. Remember how doctors reacted to Ignaz Semmelweiss when he tried to get them to wash their hands before operating on patients and delivering babies?

They had him committed.

Osterholm was right, and Marr’s groundbreaking work lends new veracity to his warning. That’s just scratching the surface.

Here’s the third thing they don’t want you to know:

As I wrote early last year, one simple tool can give you peace of mind regardless of what virus is making headlines. It’s an N95 mask. Our politicians and media have gone to great lengths to convince us all that they’re not necessary, or that they don’t work, or that they can make things worse.

It’s all baloney.

As you’ve probably gleaned by now, the mainstream media has one goal. It wants your attention. Of course, these news sources are also owned by billionaires, members of the Epstein class. They want your eyeballs, but they don’t ever want you or me to do anything actionable based on the fear they spread. They just want you to sit there and panic, then go fight trolls on your phone.

We also see many healthcare CEOs saying the quiet part out loud, more and more. They don’t want to cure patients. They don’t want to prevent the spread of disease. They want everyone to get sick.

It’s a good business model.

Pair this with Naomi Klein’s work on disaster capitalism and end times fascism, and you see the situation clearly. Does it sound like a conspiracy theory? Well, do we not have billionaires like Peter Thiel ranting about the antichrist and building bunkers? Did we not just witness Elon Musk cancel Ebola prevention funding, followed by an alarming outbreak of Ebola? Did he not lie about it?

Did he not even stand there and gloat?

He thought it was funny.

There’s been an awful lot of talk over the last year about Malthusian plots to depopulate the planet, something some of us were once called crazy for suggesting. Maybe the super rich don’t want to actively depopulate the earth, but they certainly do want to withdraw all of their money and hole up in bunkers. They don’t want to pay for things like Ebola prevention, even as they joke about it. They don’t want to spend money on protecting your health. In the end, their negligence translates into a very similar consequence. Whether it’s intentional or not, their greed and myopia will subject us to ever more pandemics and disasters. Meanwhile, they believe they’ll be able to hide from the consequences in their bunkers.

Instead of funding global public health, this regime has spent their time manipulating the stock market with tariff extortion schemes, trying to annex Canada and Greenland, and invading oil-rich countries.

Their actions speak for themselves.

There’s one last thing they don’t want you to know.

It’s called elite panic.

Researchers at Rutgers University coined this term in the early 2000s. As they documented, institutions go out of their way to suppress justified fear in civilian populations. Why? Because they don’t trust them to act with accurate information about threats. They spread misinformation, out of fear that ordinary citizens will overreact and start rioting, looting, or revolting. The strategy usually backfires, often igniting the exact panic they hoped to prevent.

John Barry makes a similar point in his book The Great Influenza. Woodrow Wilson’s administration actively suppressed early alerts about the flu in 1918 because they didn’t want it to distract everyone from war efforts. By ignoring the warning signs, they made things far worse.

We can see elite panic everywhere now. It’s the primary doctrine of our media, to control the narrative over diseases like Ebola.

They follow a simple strategy.

Have you noticed?

They bombard you with stories that trigger your fear response. Then they diffuse that fear response by telling you not to worry, there’s no cause for concern, and so on. That’s elite panic at work. The elites are panicking, but not about the threat. They’re panicking about how you’ll react.

They don’t believe you have the intelligence to protect yourself without freaking out and making things worse. They think you’ll rush out and buy a bunch of toilet paper. They’re scared you’ll drive shortages at stores and gas stations. They’re worried you’ll start riots and damage their property.

They’re worried you’ll crash the stock market. They’re worried you won’t show up for work. They’re worried that you’ll also start to do reasonable things. They’re terrified you’ll demand that the government pay for things like N95 masks, because they’re responsible for this mess.

They’re worried you’ll want tests, and vaccines.

That’s what keeps them up at night.

Not the Ebola virus.

You.

The fools in charge don’t want to spend money on Ebola prevention or precautions. They don’t want you to know they’re the ones responsible for this outbreak. They don’t want you to know they’ll be responsible if it spreads to the U.S. They don’t want you to know its airborne potential, because they don’t trust you to handle that information like a mature adult. But they’re also worried that you will handle it like a responsible adult, and demand they do something other than hold press conferences about it and tell you to wash your hands. They don’t want you to know there’s one simple tool that can protect you, because it makes them uncomfortable and it might hurt their income streams if people protect themselves. In fact, there are several tools—and some of us have spent years learning about them.

The people like me are not the ones freaking out about Ebola now, because we have the tools we need and we know how to use them.

We’re also not spreading conspiracies. Is it strange that hantavirus and Ebola are both making headlines at the same time? No, it’s not strange. It’s the consequences that climate scientists have predicted for years now. As Ed Yong wrote in an underrated Atlantic article years ago, we’ve entered the pandemicene, an era where zoonotic viruses increasingly pose threats to us. Hundreds of these viruses are waiting to spill over into humans as we overheat the planet and destroy what’s left of wild habitats. This is what’s happening.

The ones who saw this coming, we’re not the ones freaking out. I’m sure I’ll get criticized for my title, and for the image. But guess what? Americans have created an atmosphere in which the only things that break through to them are packaged as clickbait. So, we’ve created an environment where we force writers to flirt with clickbait to get the message out, and then we trash the ones who are actually telling us something important. If that’s what someone wants to do…

Meanwhile, who’s actually freaking out?

The Epstein class, that’s who, and everyone who falls for their stories. Go online and look at the Reddit threads. The people freaking out now are the ones who’ve been living in denial for the last four years, pretending that they’ll never have to wear a mask or flip on an air purifier ever again.

There’s no need to freak out over Ebola, even if it has airborne potential, even if our dumb Epstein class rulers made this happen with their reckless budget cuts, even if it starts to spread in the U.S.

If you still believe in civic action, call your representatives. Ask them why our government let a billionaire with no knowledge or training in public health kill the funding for Ebola prevention. Ask them why they let him lie about restoring it. Ask them what they’re going to do to fix this problem. When they sputter platitudes, tell them what you’ve learned from this article.

Action is not panic. Action is action.

We know what to do.

So, let’s do it.