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Comment by spdy | Hacker News Reader

What hit me most today after is saw the news. For many years ebola killed people and only after it hit mainstream media and it could have been an potential threat to the western world. Money just magical appears and we have a vaccine in less than a year.

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Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s. There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)

It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.

I think you misinterpreted the comment you're responding to.

No, I didn't. The scare of an epidemic in the U.S. has been real for decades.

This sort of snide comment has been made before. In fact, in the "malaria thread" just a few days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354

Ma8ee wrote: "Considering the nature of market economies and how the wealth is distributed in the world, it is not particularly surprising that most most medical research is aiming to cure ailments that affect white western men."

Much social, political and technological progress happens because something/people instigated those with power into believing they might be inconvenienced or harmed.

Pardon the cynicism if I say that this is how nature works. How often is that only threats make things move ?

I believe the commenters concern is that threats to african lives aren't viewed as significant threats, only threats to western lives.

More generally, policymakers tend to be concerned about their constituents and taxpayers over those who are neither.

Arguably, that's the who point of a representative democracy.

Threats to those with means, but anyway, we're led to believe this should not happen in medicine, a life is a life. It's all very sad anyway.

I expect that's the specific reason "The Hot Zone" and "The Coming Plague" name the victims.

That is, rather than "An African man had Ebola" they would say "Arthur Obama had Ebola".

There's a whole world of difference between the two.

In this case this wasn't true, since the vaccine was done and sold before the outbreak.

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