The experts were wrong

Remember the Ebola crisis -- the greatest single health threat in the history of mankind? Remember the prediction of as many as 100 million deaths worldwide, far greater than the mere 35 million victims of AIDS?

Remember the August prediction from the Center for Disease Control that there would be as many as 1.4 million cases of Ebola by the first of the new year?

Or how about the prediction from the World Bank that the epidemic would cost West Africa $36.2 billion. Now that revered financial think tank has lowered the prediction by about 90 percent.

And last but not least, do you perhaps recall that America has sent $1.2 billion along with military personnel to Africa to fight this raging epidemic and is poised in the newly-approved federal budget to take another $5 billion from taxpayers to shell out for the Ebola hysteria?

None other than The New York Times reported that there would be a predicted 10,000 new Ebola cases weekly by the first week in December. For those keeping count, the new case count averages about 450 weekly.

So what went wrong?

There are but two options that would explain this overhyped fear mongering that produced nonstop media coverage.

The first options is that health "experts" are less than sophisticated in their predictions and shouldn't be trusted or that those very same "experts" lied to create attention and the ever-popular funding from taxpayers.

Either option should be unacceptable.

But as long as we're placing blame, let's not forget the national media who without questioning accepted hyped numbers for fact and created Ebola hysteria to fill the airwaves.

Health officials who consistently questioned the Ebola fantasy were roundly criticized and shunned. There was money to be made and the World Health Organization -- the recipient of most of those dollars -- was not anxious to have dissension.

Well, the talk around the Christmas table may be on the Ferguson aftermath or the immigration mess. But it won't be about Ebola, despite Time magazine naming the Ebola volunteers as their Persons of the Year.

So just to recap -- the World Health Organization predicts dire health warnings greater than any in the history of mankind, the media jumps on the story with great urgency, and our federal government gets in on the act with a few billion dollars of wealth transferred from America to Africa.

And then you could hear the crickets chirp when the disaster proved to be a lie.

Maybe, just maybe, the smartest people on the Earth aren't so smart after all. Or perhaps they're smart enough to create a crisis and a funding stream right before our eyes.

But finally, there's one other element of blame on this overhyped fantasy.

The American public.

Let's face it, we are a gullible people who believe without question whatever portrayal the national media decides is appropriate.

Michael Jensen is the publisher of the Sikeston Standard Democrat.