Free Republic

To be honest, I’d never much thought about the Ebola lockdowns in Sierra Leone and Liberia in 2014 and 2015. Within public health, the Sierra Leone and Liberia lockdowns were an early illustration of the fact that lockdowns were ineffective, but governments of developing nations sometimes do strange things; the idea that these lockdowns might have greater geopolitical significance never occurred to me. This changed dramatically when I began studying social media activity about lockdowns before 2020. Prior to 2014, and from 2016 to 2019, there’s virtually no social media activity about lockdowns. However, this pattern changes abruptly during one...

The Ebola disinformation surfaced in a Liberian newspaper on September 9, 2014, in a letter by an American professor. The “Dear World citizens” column, by Dr. Cyril Broderick, has since been picked up by various Internet sites and “news” organizations, including Alex Jones’ Infowars, Global Research, Iranian Press TV, Information Clearing House, and something called 21st Century Wire. Labeled by some critics as the “nutty professor” and a crackpot, the professor’s “research profile” claims he is president of the International Society of African Scientists. Other local and regional sources, such as “Face 2 Face Africa,” described as “The Premier Pan-African...