Ron Paul Liberty Report - The $1.4 Billion Ebola Scam
Aired: 2015-04-16
Duration: 09:54


=== Government Intervention (09:34) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
[00:00:05]  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.
[00:00:13]  Daniel, good to be with you again today.
[00:00:15]  Good to be back doing the news.
[00:00:17]  Good.
[00:00:18]  You know, recently there was an article in the paper that followed up on the Ebola epidemic.
[00:00:23]  And, you know, we were engaged and discussed that last summer when this was occurring.
[00:00:27]  Of course, our government got involved too because of the necessity for us to solve this problem.
[00:00:33]  Looks like the problem is solved.
[00:00:35]  I mean, we spent a couple dollars, but just really, what has been going on with USAID and how much money did we spend?
[00:00:43]  It's amazing.
[00:00:44]  You know, if you remember last year, there was such a frenzy.
[00:00:46]  Everyone had to do something.
[00:00:48]  Even a lot of people who call themselves libertarians were saying we had to force vaccines on people and force them to be isolated.
[00:00:55]  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?
[00:01:12]  No, I think they treated 28 patients.
[00:01:15]  If they spent $1.4 billion, that's a lot of money treating a single patient, like, what, $50 million per patient?
[00:01:22]  $50 million a patient.
[00:01:23]  Well, I would say that wasn't a very good investment.
[00:01:28]  But also, didn't I deal with this a little bit last summer?
[00:01:31]  We talked about this.
[00:01:33]  You got in a little bit of trouble, actually.
[00:01:34]  This was back in August at the height of the panic.
[00:01:37]  And you said on a program, this is a quote actually, governments deceive us and sometimes they hype things.
[00:01:44]  I don't think we're going to see in the next year a horrendous breakout of Ebola in this country.
[00:01:49]  And they said, oh, you're downplaying it.
[00:01:51]  And then you also suggested that there's going to be some profit in the U.S. action for someone.
[00:01:55]  So it looks like Congress overacted.
[00:01:58]  You know, and it looks like I was probably right on that.
[00:02:00]  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.
[00:02:07]  You know, if there's anything that looks like a crisis or a problem, immediately they go to action.
[00:02:13]  The politicians, they have to have a political advantage and they have to get some funding.
[00:02:18]  And they immediately appropriated some funds and even sent 3,000 troops over there.
[00:02:23]  The military had to get involved.
[00:02:26]  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.
[00:02:36]  And yet here we are right now.
[00:02:39]  You know, Liberia is free from Ebola.
[00:02:42]  And I don't think it had a whole lot to do with our money being spent.
[00:02:46]  Well, if no one being treated in the centers, how was it?
[00:02:50]  Did we find out how they were able to solve this crisis of the epidemic?
[00:02:54]  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.
[00:03:05]  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.
[00:03:16]  And they usually are pretty good in setting their own rules.
[00:03:21]  They isolate people.
[00:03:22]  They don't let the traveling go on and they learn to be more particular about cleaning up.
[00:03:28]  And evidently this took care of the whole epidemic.
[00:03:32]  But just recently there was a story came out here in Houston because Galveston UTMB was involved and they were talking about their vaccine.
[00:03:45]  But they were a little bit frustrated because they needed, now the vaccine is available, maybe the money's coming through the pipeline.
[00:03:52]  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.
[00:04:00]  So they finally got a run to running the test.
[00:04:02]  And they're actually a little bit frustrated because they can't run the test.
[00:04:06]  There aren't enough sick people there to test this on.
[00:04:11]  But the other thing is, they're either too early or too late.
[00:04:14]  The vaccine was developed in conjunction with some Canadian doctors, and it's been available for 10 years.
[00:04:21]  So it wasn't available to prevent the crisis.
[00:04:23]  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.
[00:04:31]  It doesn't sound like a very good defense of the bureaucracy that seems to want to run world health affairs.
[00:04:38]  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?
[00:04:50]  It's a top-down approach.
[00:04:51]  USAID gets the money.
[00:04:53]  They send a bunch of it out to subcontractors.
[00:04:56]  In the case, as you pointed out, the military was involved.
[00:04:59]  So you had military-industrial complex getting involved to support these 3,000 troops.
[00:05:05]  You had subcontractors involved.
[00:05:07]  You had money for the vaccine companies.
[00:05:10]  So it's all a top-down, Washington-centered approach.
[00:05:13]  And it just, it didn't work, and it wasted a lot of money.
[00:05:15]  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?
[00:05:23]  Under our system today, it would have just been wasted someplace else.
[00:05:27]  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.
[00:05:36]  Maybe it created 100 new jobs someplace, but nobody knows that.
[00:05:42]  And this is the problem.
[00:05:45]  But if you cut it, it doesn't really solve all our problems if they don't cut something else.
[00:05:56]  And they just go on and on and figure, how am I going to get a political advantage of this?
[00:06:00]  And this is a pretty good example of why governments shouldn't be involved.
[00:06:07]  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.
[00:06:22]  All right, we save a billion dollars.
[00:06:24]  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.
[00:06:39]  You know, like so many people have become dependent and you don't want to throw the kids out of the hospitals.
[00:06:46]  You wouldn't have to.
[00:06:47]  But you know, the odds of us working this out and saying this is wasteful.
[00:06:51]  No, the politics are so powerful, whether it's the drug companies, the politicians, and the people who want to rush in.
[00:06:57]  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.
[00:07:11]  And they know what the sentiments are.
[00:07:14]  It's real hard to back away because, you know, the people say, well, he doesn't have a heart and doesn't care.
[00:07:20]  I remember the first vote, one of the very first votes I ever cast in 1976 and Ford was president.
[00:07:28]  And we had the swine flu epidemic that never got off one military base.
[00:07:33]  But there was panic.
[00:07:35]  They rushed a bill to the floor, mandatory vaccinations, and they did all this.
[00:07:40]  And there were two of us that voted against it, another doctor and myself, one Democrat and one Republican.
[00:07:45]  It was Larry McDonald and I, but they weren't paying any attention to us.
[00:07:49]  But the political effort was to look like you're doing something.
[00:07:55]  And it turned out that more people died and got seriously ill from the vaccine, and the epidemic never materialized.
[00:08:02]  And this is sort of what's happening here.
[00:08:05]  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.
[00:08:16]  This is an example of waste, fraud, and abuse.
[00:08:20]  But you know, the government always does like to reassert its power.
[00:08:23]  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.
[00:08:35]  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.
[00:08:53]  So I think this gave them a real boost, something to do.
[00:08:57]  Soften their image.
[00:08:58]  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.
[00:09:05]  Yeah, and, you know, in many ways, this is part of the empire.
[00:09:10]  And it's a little PR work with a lot of people who are very sympathetic and they use it.
[00:09:17]  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.
[00:09:29]  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 Misuse (00:18) ===

[00:09:35]  Anyway, I guess we can keep doing our best to expose the truth.
[00:09:40]  But I wasn't there, but I would have voted against that.
[00:09:45]  $1.4 billion for USAID.
[00:09:48]  That's a shock.
[00:09:50]  Thank you, everybody, for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.