Medical workers of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy hospital in Monrovia put on protective suits prior to carrying bodies of Ebola virus victims on September 6, 2014. The death toll from the Ebola epidemic has climbed above 2,000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on September 5, as it voiced hopes a vaccine could be available in November. The deadly virus has claimed 2,097 lives out of 3,944 people infected in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, since emerging last December, the UN's health organ said after a two-day crisis meeting in Geneva. AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGET (Photo credit should read DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images) Medical workers of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy hospital in Monrovia put on protective suits prior to carrying bodies of Ebola virus victims on September 6, 2014. (credit: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) — The largest newspaper in Liberia published a conspiracy theory accusing the United States of intentionally engineering the Ebola and AIDS viruses in bioterrorism research labs and infecting Africans with the virus through vaccinations.

The news article, “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?” was published by the Liberian Daily Observer on Tuesday. It specifically implicates the U.S government, Department of Defense, American research universities in participating in an “American Military-Medical-Industry” Cold War scheme to test bioweapons in African nations.

Dr. Cyril E. Broderick Sr. references several “reports” and the 1994 science fiction novel “The Hot Zone” to accuse the U.S. Department of Defense of testing biological weapons under the rouse of administering vaccination to improve health concerns of “black Africans overseas” and secretly attack the Soviet Union. One report links 1970s research that “made it obvious that the war was between countries that hosted the KGB and the CIA, and the ‘manufacture’ of AIDS-Like Viruses’ was clearly directed at the other.”

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The article is penned by Broderick, a former professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia’s College of Agriculture and Forestry and a former Observer Farmer in the 1980s. He has also taught at the Agricultural College of the University of Delaware.

With a circulation of 30,000 – primarily in the Liberian capital of Monrovia – the Daily Observer is featuring the article on its front page and is being criticized for fueling an already rampant distrust of Western vaccination programs in African communities.

Broderick cites several prominent Western health organization for “selecting and enticing African countries to participate in testing events, promoting vaccinations” and setting up test spots for “emerging diseases, especially Ebola.”

Among those connected to the international scheme to test the Ebola and AIDS virus in Africa: The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md.; Tulane University, including a grant of more than $7 million the National Institute of Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French name, Medicins Sans Frontiers); Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company; and GlaxoSmithKline in the U.K.

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Broderick said that African leaders need to protect their own people from becoming Western “guinea pigs.”

“There is urgent need for affirmative action in protecting the less affluent of poorer countries, especially African citizens, whose countries are not as scientifically and industrially endowed as the United States and most Western countries, sources of most viral or bacterial GMOs that are strategically designed as biological weapons,” Broderick continued. “It is most disturbing that the U. S. Government has been operating a viral hemorrhagic fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Sierra Leone. Are there others?”

— Benjamin Fearnow