Remember last year's panic about ebola? USAID spent $1.4 billion constructing treatment centers in Africa but nine out of the 11 centers did not treat a single patient. The locals using hygienic products and traditional methods solved the crisis before the US top-down approach. But plenty of contractors did very well in this boondoggle!
Remember last year's panic about ebola? USAID spent $1.4 billion constructing treatment centers in Africa but nine out of the 11 centers did not treat a single patient. The locals using hygienic products and traditional methods solved the crisis before the US top-down approach. But plenty of contractors did very well in this boondoggle!
Remember last year's panic about ebola? USAID spent $1.4 billion constructing treatment centers in Africa but nine out of the 11 centers did not treat a single patient. The locals using hygienic products and traditional methods solved the crisis before the US top-down approach. But plenty of contractors did very well in this boondoggle!
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity and also a co-host of this program.
Daniel, good to be with you again today.
Good to be back doing the news.
Good.
You know, recently there was an article in the paper that followed up on the Ebola epidemic.
And, you know, we were engaged and discussed that last summer when this was occurring.
Of course, our government got involved too because of the necessity for us to solve this problem.
Looks like the problem is solved.
I mean, we spent a couple dollars, but just really, what has been going on with USAID and how much money did we spend?
It's amazing.
You know, if you remember last year, there was such a frenzy.
Everyone had to do something.
Even a lot of people who call themselves libertarians were saying we had to force vaccines on people and force them to be isolated.
We found out that the USAID spent $1.4 billion constructing, I think it was 11 treatment centers and putting in all sorts of different kinds of programs and NGOs, but they didn't do too well with that, did they?
No, I think they treated 28 patients.
If they spent $1.4 billion, that's a lot of money treating a single patient, like, what, $50 million per patient?
$50 million a patient.
Well, I would say that wasn't a very good investment.
But also, didn't I deal with this a little bit last summer?
We talked about this.
You got in a little bit of trouble, actually.
This was back in August at the height of the panic.
And you said on a program, this is a quote actually, governments deceive us and sometimes they hype things.
I don't think we're going to see in the next year a horrendous breakout of Ebola in this country.
And they said, oh, you're downplaying it.
And then you also suggested that there's going to be some profit in the U.S. action for someone.
So it looks like Congress overacted.
You know, and it looks like I was probably right on that.
That doesn't mean I knew what was going to happen in that specific incidence, but I have a pretty good feel about how Washington works.
You know, if there's anything that looks like a crisis or a problem, immediately they go to action.
The politicians, they have to have a political advantage and they have to get some funding.
And they immediately appropriated some funds and even sent 3,000 troops over there.
The military had to get involved.
And I was also convinced, and I think there was a specific appropriation for the development of vaccines and for the drug companies to get involved.
And yet here we are right now.
You know, Liberia is free from Ebola.
And I don't think it had a whole lot to do with our money being spent.
Well, if no one being treated in the centers, how was it?
Did we find out how they were able to solve this crisis of the epidemic?
Well, it looks like maybe common sense in their personal experience and maybe a little chlorine or something helped out in just following some habits, health habits.
And I remember reading back last summer about this that we're worrying too much because these towns and countries and communities in Africa have gone through this many times.
And they usually are pretty good in setting their own rules.
They isolate people.
They don't let the traveling go on and they learn to be more particular about cleaning up.
And evidently this took care of the whole epidemic.
But just recently there was a story came out here in Houston because Galveston UTMB was involved and they were talking about their vaccine.
But they were a little bit frustrated because they needed, now the vaccine is available, maybe the money's coming through the pipeline.
And I don't know for certain exactly where the money came from, but my guess is that government's always involved with promoting vaccines and all this.
So they finally got a run to running the test.
And they're actually a little bit frustrated because they can't run the test.
There aren't enough sick people there to test this on.
But the other thing is, they're either too early or too late.
The vaccine was developed in conjunction with some Canadian doctors, and it's been available for 10 years.
So it wasn't available to prevent the crisis.
And then when the crisis hits, the government moves in, and now we're going to give the vaccine, and there are no patients to test it on.
It doesn't sound like a very good defense of the bureaucracy that seems to want to run world health affairs.
Yeah, and I don't think that the motivation of people who wanted to help was negative necessarily, but isn't this exactly how USAID and all of these foreign aid organizations in the U.S. operate?
It's a top-down approach.
USAID gets the money.
They send a bunch of it out to subcontractors.
In the case, as you pointed out, the military was involved.
So you had military-industrial complex getting involved to support these 3,000 troops.
You had subcontractors involved.
You had money for the vaccine companies.
So it's all a top-down, Washington-centered approach.
And it just, it didn't work, and it wasted a lot of money.
It didn't, you know, from a free market viewpoint, the question is, is what could happen if you didn't spend the $1.4 billion?
Under our system today, it would have just been wasted someplace else.
But in theory, if you cut something of $1.4 billion, you could allow that money to stay in the economy, and it would help somebody, but nobody knew who it would be.
Maybe it created 100 new jobs someplace, but nobody knows that.
And this is the problem.
But if you cut it, it doesn't really solve all our problems if they don't cut something else.
And they just go on and on and figure, how am I going to get a political advantage of this?
And this is a pretty good example of why governments shouldn't be involved.
Matter of fact, I took a position in the presidential campaign that if you cut a billion dollars from something, let's say we could have saved, I used as an example the embassy in Baghdad.
All right, we save a billion dollars.
If they would take half of that and cut the deficit and the spending by a half a billion, I am content to sort of bend the rules of libertarianism and say, well, use the other half to try to tide people over who have become dependent.
You know, like so many people have become dependent and you don't want to throw the kids out of the hospitals.
You wouldn't have to.
But you know, the odds of us working this out and saying this is wasteful.
No, the politics are so powerful, whether it's the drug companies, the politicians, and the people who want to rush in.
The people who support this, it's not so much that I think most of the time they're not motivated by doing harm, but they're motivated by putting their finger up to the wind.
And they know what the sentiments are.
It's real hard to back away because, you know, the people say, well, he doesn't have a heart and doesn't care.
I remember the first vote, one of the very first votes I ever cast in 1976 and Ford was president.
And we had the swine flu epidemic that never got off one military base.
But there was panic.
They rushed a bill to the floor, mandatory vaccinations, and they did all this.
And there were two of us that voted against it, another doctor and myself, one Democrat and one Republican.
It was Larry McDonald and I, but they weren't paying any attention to us.
But the political effort was to look like you're doing something.
And it turned out that more people died and got seriously ill from the vaccine, and the epidemic never materialized.
And this is sort of what's happening here.
There's still a case to be made that volunteerism and less government bureaucracy can solve these problems, not perfectly, but certainly better than this.
This is an example of waste, fraud, and abuse.
But you know, the government always does like to reassert its power.
And I think one thing we touched on earlier that's worth revisiting for a moment is the sending of these 3,000 troops to fight Ebola, because this is something that we've been looking at for a while, this AFRICOM, Africa Command.
If you look over the past few years at how the U.S. military has moved into country after country in Africa, and they're just looking for a mission, they're looking to justify increasing the military presence there, doing all sorts of training with different African troops, and just reestablishing the U.S. presence and hegemony.
So I think this gave them a real boost, something to do.
Soften their image.
And even some of the progressives, you know, who you would otherwise get along with, said, well, this shows that the military can be used for a good purpose.
Yeah, and, you know, in many ways, this is part of the empire.
And it's a little PR work with a lot of people who are very sympathetic and they use it.
But AFCOM and all these places just represents our involvement in countries, the internal affairs, entangling alliances, and we're always looking for a new one every single day.
When there's a hint that we might be backing off a little bit, somebody creates two new problems and we have to go into there.
Exposing Military Misuse00:00:18
Anyway, I guess we can keep doing our best to expose the truth.
But I wasn't there, but I would have voted against that.
$1.4 billion for USAID.
That's a shock.
Thank you, everybody, for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.