A couple things here. If AIDS was a fast killing disease, if we knew it was going to kill its victims with a morbid, matter-of-fact eventuality, it would have been reacted to very differently by the public. It was so easy to get into this country and stay unnoticed because it is not a spectacular, fast, gory killer like ebola. It is also nowhere near as contagious. It's not even apples to oranges.
Malaria doesn't survive in this county's climate, although it likely will begin to in places like Florida and souther Louisiana sooner, rather than later, and it requires a mosquito vector.
I am going to "inject" this here because it is relevant to this discussion. Malaria actually thrives here and did so from colonial times until the 1940s, so well in fact it was killing thousands of Americans a year until in 1939 Swiss scientist Paul Muller discovered DDT which was so effective at killing mosquitos that he received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1948. It was a phenomenon, and absolutely destroyed malaria rates worldwide...for example India went from 75 MILLION infections a year to about 15,000.
The National Academy of Science had this to say:
“To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable.”
So what happened? A couple of flawed studies suggested DDT was killing birds might be toxic to people, despite the fact it had been used millions of times worldwide without a single documented case of a person succumbing to DDT, even the sprayers. That didnt stop radical environmentalists from going into frenzy mode and lobbying for the ban on DDT. One of them wrote a book called "Silent Spring" which ridiculous as it sounds and with no proof claimed that DDT was an threat to the very survival of the human race (gee, sound familiar?) and the fear mongering rose to a whole new level. The US Department of Health put out a study estimating that life expectancy would fall to 42 years by 1980! The Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Greenpeace among others jumped on the bandwagon and bowing to political pressure from environmentalist lawsuits the EPA banned DDT. A similar pattern followed worldwide, with the United Nations threatening to withhold grants in the third world countries that benefited more than anyone from DDT.
The bird egg myth has been debunked, though environmentalists trying to justify this trail of depravity to this day try to revive the debunked studies leading to the ban. There are now over 200MILLION infections a year worldwide, and though modern treatments have imporved survivability once contracted, still close to a million people a year die from the disease.
The bottom line is that far more people have been killed from the environmental lobby than Hitler.
How does this relate to pandemics? First, sit up an take notice when the environmental lobby uses government to save you from yourself, there is a knife intended for your back in there somewhere. Some of these people are well meaning animal lovers whose emotion blinds them to fact, but I believe the leadership is something else, and has a different goal in mind. Consider the following qoute from David Graber, National Park Service research biologist:
"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity,
are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I
know social scientists who remind me that people are
part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the
line -- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that -
- we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have
become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It
is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will
choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption,
and the Third World its suicidal consumption of
landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should
decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for
the right virus to come along."David M. Graber
(National Park Service research biologist)
I am not saying ebola is that right virus. What I am saying is that the same people who have destroyed millions of lives through the DDT ban would privately be gleeful if a virus destroyed another few millions, because they see you an I as the real virus. Malaria, global warming control measures, communist population controls, and possibly viral pandemics are tools in their arsenal. I would not be surprised if some day one of them "helped" the right virus come along.