*Why did the white people get the medicine while all those black people were dying?*
1. Three vials of serum were sent. We haven’t been told who the recipient of the third vial is.
2.Medical staff would be considered hyperinformed of the risks of an experimental treatment and so the medical ethics issue is sidestepped with those volunteers.
3. It was Samaritan who ferretted out MAPP - and - who agreed to hold MAPP legally harmless in exchange for access to the treatment, so legal issues were also sidestepped.
4. When giving an untested-in-humans treatment to a foreign national in a foreign country without that country’s explicit approval or guarantee not to hold anyone involved in distribution legally liable, there may be legal issues as well as ethical issues preventing distribution.
5. There isn’t a vat of zMAPP sitting around and nobody knew whether it would work or not.
however, the reporter may be happy to learn that :
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it would ask medical ethics experts to explore emergency use of experimental treatments...”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/07/us-health-ebola-idUSKBN0G61ID20140807
It doesn’t make sense to release a weaponized disease unless you have a ready available antidote. This incident plays right into that conspiracy theory.
Nicotiana = Tobacco (or a close relative thereof)
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For Pete's sake!
If the medicine was given only to black people and they suddenly dropped dead, the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world would say that the white man gave it to the black man using the black man as part of the testing of the drug.
That the white man experimented on the black man because white man see the black man as expendable.
The bigotry and idiocy march on. It is tiresome.
Nicotiana are tobacco plants. Do smokers have some immunity to Ebola? Baseball players with a "chaw" in their cheeks?
If they had given the Africans the serum there would have been cries that they were experimenting on people of colors. Treating them as mere guinea pigs.