The Ebola scare is inspiring me. We love a horror story. Speaking of which, everyone should reread Edgar Allan Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death,” right now. The Red Death, he said, caused “profuse bleeding at the pores.” I think Poe was onto something there.
Would I rather be crushed by the Great Next Seattle Subduction Fault Earthquake or gush out all my bodily fluids thanks to a rare virus? If you’re like me, you like to frolic away the day entertaining such questions, and we can be thankful that we live in good times, when we are surrounded by such excellent ideas from which our fantasies may embark.
Some dwell on other fears. Perhaps, being unable to directly dwell on agonizing, horrific personal death, there are those who instead change the subject to such things as: “Did you know that the U.S. government has a patent on the Ebola virus? Yes! It’s true!”
Yes, it’s true. How worrisome is that?
Well, it depends. If you’re one of the Koch Brothers, and you like amassing money and power to control the world, you’re probably miffed that the U.S. government has a patent on Ebola because you wanted that yourself.
Let’s clear up this confusion. If you go to patent number CA2741523A1, the patent in question, you will find it says it concerns one “invention” after another. This fact has been used to try to tell us that Ebola virus was itself invented by the government.
In reality the word “invention” in U.S. patents is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) to include certain kinds of discoveries, including discoveries concerning disease organisms, useful plants, etc. Nothing in the government’s Ebola patent says that Ebola itself was invented in the customary sense. The inventions are discoveries of fact about it.
Here’s another popular confusion: We are supposed to believe that the government has this patent to prevent us from coming up with cures against Ebola. The claim is that they are going to take legal action if you use their patent.
In fact, the purpose of the government patenting such things is to ensure the opposite. The government patents generally happen because the research done was done with public taxpayer provided funds, and years ago a forward-thinking congress actually wrote laws providing that the government could retain patents in such cases and, further, provided in the same laws that anyone with ability to use a government patent shall be licensed such use without having to pay any royalty!
So, contrary to what the fear-mongers would have you believe, the government’s Ebola patent is not only not a plot to keep people from using the knowledge described within the patent, it is a congressionally approved government plot to facilitate the free use of that information if it would help to find a cure. Oh, yes — and it also keeps corporations from sitting on the knowledge.
The right wing hates all this, because they don’t want government for the people and knowledge retained by the government for the people’s free use.
Have at it. If you think you might be able to use the patented discoveries of CA2741523A1 (having of course read them and thoroughly understood them) to come up with a cure for Ebola, look up Code of Federal Regulations on your Google or your Wikipedia, click on Title 37, then click on Chapter IV, then navigate to §404. Make your application out to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services.
Now if anybody still wants something to be paranoid about, try thinking how Dick Cheney’s friends at Halliburton and its former engineering subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, et al., would like to profit off of mass quarantines of Americans in camps of their construction and management. Ask yourself which Americans would be forced into camps if it came to that. You know what the man said: “We have nothing to fear except fear itself.” That, and that people may use our fears to control us.