The snake venom was being sold in 2013. Someone, somewhere, was marketing it as a cure for Ebola. Not metaphorically. Not as a joke. As a product. And people were buying it.
Alongside the snake venom came vitamin C megadoses, Nano Silver solutions, clove oil, garlic protocols, and a soup made from a leafy West African plant called ewedu. None of it worked. None of it had ever been tested. The virus didn't care. It kept moving through Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea — and so did the remedies, jumping borders without passports, traveling through Facebook shares and email forwards and late-night radio. The outbreak was biological. The misinformation was something else entirely. Faster. Harder to contain. And in some ways, more instructive about how human beings process fear.
Gary Coody noticed. The national health fraud coordinator for the FDA watched the marketplace of fake cures bloom in real time and reached for an analogy that said everything: the people selling these remedies, he said publicly, were like roofers who chase storms. Disaster arrives. The opportunists follow. His concern wasn't abstract. Patients who believed in the snake venom, the silver solution, the soup — those patients might wait. Might not go to a clinic. Might die at home convinced they were treating themselves.
The 2013–2016 West African Ebola epidemic was the largest in recorded history. Over 11,000 people died. The world's attention, when it finally arrived, was enormous and chaotic — and the internet was ready for it. By 2013, social media platforms had matured into genuine information ecosystems, which also made them mature misinformation ecosystems. Twitter moved breaking news in minutes. Facebook's algorithm rewarded engagement, and fear engages. YouTube hosted hours of testimony from people who had "survived" using unproven treatments. The architecture of virality didn't distinguish between a peer-reviewed paper and a wellness blogger's post about colloidal silver. Both traveled the same pipes.
The communities paying closest attention to Ebola misinformation were, in many ways, already primed. Prepper forums, alternative health networks, and conspiracy-adjacent spaces had spent years building distrust of pharmaceutical institutions and government health agencies. When Ebola arrived in the headlines, those communities had ready-made frameworks. The virus wasn't just a virus. It was evidence of something. The only question was what.
The timeline of claims tracks almost perfectly with the timeline of fear. When cases surged in Liberia in 2014, an article appeared in the Liberian Observer — a real, established newspaper — alleging that the Ebola virus was a bioweapon engineered by the United States military as a tool of population control. The article spread far beyond Liberia. It reached American conspiracy forums, West African diaspora communities, international news aggregators. The claim had no verified evidence behind it. Scientific and governmental authorities disputed it directly. None of that slowed its circulation.
Simultaneously, a separate current of theory ran through American online spaces: the New World Order had engineered the virus. The quarantines weren't public health measures. They were rehearsals for martial law. The travel bans were pretexts. This framing borrowed from decades of existing conspiracy infrastructure and simply inserted Ebola into the slot. No credible evidence supported any of it. The theories spread anyway, because they weren't really about Ebola — they were about a pre-existing belief that institutions lie, that crises are manufactured, that the official story is always a cover.
By 2019, a new outbreak hit the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the misinformation mutated to fit the new context. Rumors spread that the virus had been deliberately imported — for financial gain, or to harvest organs for black market trafficking. Healthcare workers in the DRC faced violence from communities who believed treatment centers were sites of organ extraction. People fled contact tracing. The misinformation wasn't just wrong. It was operationally destructive, actively interfering with the public health response in ways that are difficult to fully measure but impossible to dismiss.
What didn't add up, across all of these outbreaks, was the geography of belief. The bioweapon theories and New World Order narratives were heavily documented online — in English, on Western platforms, in communities with reliable internet access. But the DRC and Uganda and rural Liberia didn't primarily run on Twitter. They ran on radio. And radio was nearly invisible to the researchers tracking misinformation through social media scraping and keyword analysis. The communities most directly affected by the virus were also the communities whose information environment was least understood.
The ewedu soup claim, documented by the BMJ, was a specific and telling example. Ewedu is a real plant, used in West African cooking. The claim that it could cure Ebola was not supported by any scientific evidence. But the claim circulated through oral networks, through community radio, through the kind of trusted local transmission that a retweet count can't capture. Unqualified blood transfusions were also promoted as a cure — a practice that carries its own serious medical risks. The gap between what researchers could see and what was actually being believed in affected communities was vast.
What investigators confirmed is relatively narrow but significant. The FDA documented the sale of unproven Ebola treatments in the United States during the 2013–2016 epidemic, including snake venom, Nano Silver, vitamin C, clove oil, garlic, and ewedu-based products. Gary Coody's public statements established that federal health authorities were aware of the problem and concerned about treatment delay as a direct consequence. The BMJ confirmed the circulation of specific false cure claims. The Liberian Observer article alleging US military bioweapon development was real and documented, though the claim itself has no evidentiary basis.
What remained contested was the actual impact. How many people delayed care because they were trying a home remedy? How many fled treatment centers because they believed the organ trafficking rumors? These numbers are not cleanly available. The causal chain between a Facebook post and a death is not something epidemiologists can easily draw. Researchers acknowledged the harm was plausible and likely — Coody said so explicitly — but the precise toll of the misinformation epidemic remains unmeasured.
The community came to believe, in various configurations, that the outbreaks were engineered, that the cures were being suppressed, that quarantine was a power grab. These beliefs were not fringe in the way that word implies smallness. They reached mainstream platforms, mainstream audiences, and in some regions, mainstream acceptance. The speculation was never confirmed. It was also never fully extinguished.
Jonathan Mukiibi was thinking about the radio problem when he brought his research to the Deep Learning Indaba 2024 conference in Dakar, Senegal. Working out of the Makerere Artificial Intelligence Lab at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Mukiibi had used AI to generate transcripts from thousands of hours of Ugandan radio broadcasts — the medium that actually reaches rural communities where internet penetration is low. The goal was to study how Ebola was being discussed, perceived, and explained in those offline spaces. His presentation suggested that the beliefs circulating there might differ significantly from what was visible on the internet — that there was an entire layer of misinformation ecology that the standard tools of digital research had never touched.
That research is ongoing. The gap it points to — between what's visible online and what's believed offline — remains open. The AI tools Mukiibi used are new enough that the full picture hasn't emerged yet. What's already clear is that the misinformation surrounding Ebola wasn't a single phenomenon. It was several phenomena running in parallel, in different languages, across different media, aimed at different fears. The snake venom salesmen and the bioweapon theorists and the radio rumors weren't coordinated. They didn't need to be.
The question that lingers isn't whether misinformation spread during the Ebola outbreaks. It did, demonstrably, at scale. The question is what's still circulating in the places no one has thought to listen to yet.