World News

See also: USA.

They're mad that the facilities are not releasing the (highly contagious) bodies to the dead person's family for "proper" burial. The facilities are instead following proper protocol, and burying the bodies safely. Some of them honestly believe that Ebola isn't real, and is instead a scam by white westerners to steal Black bodies for nefarious purposes.

It's literally just ignorance and paranoia. They're attacking the very people who are helping them, because of a conspiracy theory and a lack of education.

I was in Sierra Leone during their outbreak in 2015 (I'm not a healthcare worker, but I was there to feed the healthcare workers), and we faced similar challenges. We had to cancel our mission because we were attacked so many times, and it wasn't safe to be there.

So, symptoms of early stage ebola are fever, chills and tiredness - which happen to be the symptoms of much more common issues like malaria and pneumonia. So for the villagers (who, remember, have hundreds of years of generational trauma from both distant "authorities" and white people), someone gets sick, gets medical treatment but still dies - that's just stuff that happens (many ebola cases don't have unexplained bleeding or lesions). But a few days after the death, "authority" people in space suits show up, search the village and start forcibly moving anyone who's sick into tents or other locations. They intrusively question who has had contact with the sick people, and they may get moved into quarantine as well. In a community where families care for the sick, the families and friends are prevented from seeing their loved ones. And then their loved ones just ... disappear. They're told that they died, but also that they can't see, handle or bury the body.

This version of ebola has "only" about a 50% death rate, so half the people who get it simply disappear, and the people who are returned are weakened (sometimes severely) from their illness. But the people also have memories and rumors of other ebola strains, strains that killed over 90% of the people who got it.

Someone in the village gets sick and dies. Then the "authorities" show up and start kidnapping people, many of whom are never seen again. You can't visit them, you can't help them, you can't even bury them - they're just gone, taken by strangers, because that's what strangers sometimes do. They tell you whatever weird things they're doing are for your own good, but what they're saying doesn't make sense to you - and they've said that before and many times it hasn't been.

Your community comes up with a reason for their actions that makes more sense to you, so that's what you believe. So you attack the space-suited strangers when they try to kidnap more people, you burn down the building where they're going to disappear people. Or if you're in the US, you refuse to take a vaccine because it's going to allow the government to track you, and if you feel sick you swallow bunches of horse paste and you defy orders not to go to church because it's your town, your church, and you'll be damned if you let those bastards in Washington break your community with some fake disease like covid.

For transparency, I'm a second hand source, close to multiple people who lived across the region.

Generally, the region is both extremely distrustful of government and outsiders, as well as being extremely prone to superstition and magic thinking. Obviously, there is the spectre of colonialism, but more recently than this, governments in the region are generally corrupt, violent and unstable on a scale westerners would find unbelievable. For example, (if I remeber right) Nigeria recently issued new bills but then much of the money """disappeared""" before reaching banks and other organizations. The president claimed snakes ate the money. More relevant to this, with the inconsistent enforcement of laws, doctors are often unreliable or outright dangerous, such as giving sugar pills instead of medication. I have no idea of the authenticity of this (which is part of the problem), but from my own circle, there were stories of patients of the last ebola outbreak taken for quarentine, and then left unattended to or without food and water. Given all this, its not suprising that they wouldn't trust outsiders taking people away.

At the same time, there is an abundance of superstition and magical thinking. I'm not sure how much of this is cultural versus reglious versus trauma and oppression versus lack of education, but belief in conspiracies, witchcraft, demons/spirits, and other such stuff is widespread to the point where it make the American south look tame. This is fed into further by the same sorts of social media rumors and misinformation that have become popular globally, but with far more gulibility and far less ability to disprove them (due to lack of education, and lack of local resources).

Taken together, you have basically the perfect cultural environment for this sort of anti-science movement.

People there don't trust outsiders and have no idea about how all this works. They probably think their relatives are subjected to nefarious experiments which kill them. So they try to free them from those government supplied monsters.

Seems like people are being held due to infection and others are trying to break them out from the way it's worded.