Why would one want to patent deadly virus like Ebola?

The Democratic Republic of Congo has declared the end of the country’s ninth Ebola outbreak; coming just 11 weeks after health officials sounded the alarm in May.

Ebola outbreaks are typically declared over when two incubation periods have passed after the last patient is released from treatment with no new confirmed cases.

Over the course of the outbreak, the DRC recorded 54 cases, 33 of them fatal. Of the 54 cases, 38 were lab-confirmed and 16 were classified as probable.

World Health Organization (WHO) officials joined the Congolese officials in Kinshasa to celebrate the announcement.

The outbreak according to WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was contained due to the tireless efforts of local teams, the support of partners, the generosity of donors, and the effective leadership of the Congolese Ministry of Health.

This was quite welcome news and to add to that there was news that WHO had also provided a vaccine called rVSV ZEBOV which proved to be highly successful during the West African pandemic when it was tested in the later days of the outbreak.

Though with all the challenges that is involved in distribution and storage in tropical countries, data from the trials show that it was safe and effective. But as the world (let’s say Africa) celebrates there are more questions that are left unanswered especially with the outbreak in the Congo. We breathe a sigh of relief but what is the true origin of the Ebola virus (EboBUN)? According to Modern Ghana website that has written extensively on the epidemic, the recent outbreak in the DRC occurred close to an American Laboratory working on dangerous diseases in Uganda not far from the DRC border.

The number of victims though insignificant compared to that in West Africa four years ago, however there were several Western companies that were already suggesting that there were vaccines against the epidemic which were developed by them. I might not be in the know but generally the American approach of studying dangerous diseases looks quite strange and suspicious, for example in 2010, the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention flew a Ugandan patient with a Ebola strain to the US. The question here is why would anyone want to patent a deadly virus like Ebola and if so why hasn’t anyone tried to claim rights for cancer or diabetes which are a threat to mankind as well?

According to certain prominent American experts, there is completely no need for such measures which include delivering patients to the US because there are no economic benefits given the fact that this specialized market remains very narrow.

Nevertheless, for some reason some of the first Ebola patients were taken to the US, this then brings me to the question, was this move intentional or out of sheer scientific curiosity, should the former be true then it confirms the fears that Ebola is an artificial disease with a possibility of being turned into a biological weapon.

In the last 10 years the number of American research laboratories have increased from 20 to almost 400, most of these are located in Africa (including East Africa) and Latin America. These are questions that beg very serious answers from the perpetrators of this conspiracy if at all this virus was manufactured as some have consistently asserted for economic purposes.

There are two theories worked out, which for some reason seem to come from the US again, one of them is that after an outbreak a pharmacological company appears during the mass hysteria and presents a prepared vaccine. The drug is then bought by millions including governments and the company earns huge profits for developing a medicine against a local virus. The second scenario even gets worse by suggesting the possibility of using such outbreaks as biological weapons

There is every evidence that there are some beneficiaries especially after the behaviour of Western pharmaceutical companies announced almost immediately that they had found the vaccine to the virus.

As usual, we are dealing with the big cats and who shall bell it!

Mr Owere is The Citizen sub-editor