They didn’t believe the scientists.
Ebola — It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post 10/19/2014 02:37 am ET Updated Dec 18, 2014
Ebola’s the open secret no one wanted to know about. This is anything but a new story. The Hot Zone caused a stir early in the ‘90s’; Virus Hunter toward the end. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a chronic problem with the media. Headlines moved on to the next crisis de jour. Our program chose to look beyond those headlines. What we found is eerily prescient — virologists (people who study viruses) imploring us, begging us, to pay attention*.
What America, and therefore the world, got instead was the result of virulent Republican loathing of our government (except when subsidizing or protecting big business). Public funds plummeted while private funding was living down to its promise. In this cut-government-at-any-cost world, we’re now paying a deadly price for the stunning cuts. One example suffices: The 2013 Republican orchestrated “sequestration” required an National Institutes of Health across-the-board $1.55 billion cut in every area of medical research.
*We could easily have titled this piece “We Were Warned, and Warned, and Warned…” In 1997 we broadcast a program with Dr. C.J. Peters, then Chief of Special Pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control (and author of Virus Hunter).