The Zika virus appears to be the latest in a long line of health 'doom mongerings' that has gone viral on social media and the internet and has been stirred and sloshed on mainstream media. It follows in the recent tradition of doom laden health scare stories such as Aids, Bird Flu, and Mad Cow Disease – and more recently the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. For a view from a mainstream party line go to http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2016/31/genetically-modi… …
The blog writer is critical of the idea that it involved BioTech or GM science which was designed to reduce the threat from Zika and various other tropical diseases. This is interesting as we have a notorious climate change alarmist, Oliver Tickell, writing in the environmentalist magazine the 'Ecologist', and trying to blame BioTech and GM science for the renewed phase of the virus – which the blog author shoots down in flames. Environmentalists are predictable when it comes to BioTech – they even campaign against Golden Rice. It is a peculiar blockage in their heads – anything on the cusp of science is shouted down as evil. You must not play around with nature we are told, even when it comes to saving the lives of lots of people, and making others better as a result of malarial illnesses. Meanwhile, the same people can't keep their fingers away from mobile devices. Very peculiar.
One problem for the conspiracy theory is that the Bio Tech anti-mosquito trial was 1300 miles away from the epicentre of the Zika outbreak. That should be enough to stop the conspirators in their tracks but environmentalists ignore anything contrary to their alarmism and always continue to bark like mad about scares that are no longer scary – such as ozone depletion. The blog author then has a pop at stories that appeared in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror (but the media just love doom laden stories) accusing the journalists of poor research. Do any newspapers do proper research? Is the BBC any better?
He ends by saying journalists do not take seriously wild stories about the Illuminati and Aliens, or hidden messages in $100 dollar bills, or chem trails etc., so why do they take the Zika virus scare story seriously? Obviously it is because health scares have a long pedigree and are known to get the wind up of sections of the population. They also know that most people take health scares with a liberal dose of scepticism – they have cried wolf too often. Mind you, we are all gullible to some extent – or willing to swallow some things rather than others. Catastrophists sometimes see evidence of catastrophe where nothing out of the ordinary has occurred – and so on.
See also http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/02/05/what-lessons-will-we-l…