The Washington Post is calling
Jon Schultz a “merchant of disease.” The Las Vegas businessman owns the
domain name Ebola.com, and now he’s selling it for $150,000.
Schultz’s company, Blue String
Ventures, reportedly purchased the domain name in 2008 for $13,500, and
also owns other disease-related domain names such as birdflu.com and
H1N1.com. Schultz is quoted as saying the site is getting 5,000
page-views a day and he thinks the price increase is more than fair.
Yahoo Finance editor in chief
Aaron Task says, although distasteful, Schultz has the right to sell the
domain name. “We live in a capitalistic society, he bought it legally
and he’s trying to sell it legally…I don’t see what the outrage is about
this.”
Schultz declined Yahoo Finance’s
request for an interview and expressed his displeasure with the
Washington Post article. In the comments section on the paper’s website,
Schultz claims he was misquoted and refutes the idea that the domain
name would somehow benefit the medical community, writing “It is just a
domain name, not a miracle cure.”
The site itself is limited,
featuring a link encouraging donations to Doctors Without Borders via
their website. It has a few news articles posted to it but Task feels
Schultz is missing an opportunity. “He could make this the news
destination for Ebola stories, sell ads against it, and probably make a
couple of thousand dollars, maybe not $150,000…if it’s about a money
making venture, I think he’s thinking about it in too limited a way.”
Task believes that the
government or a company such as hazmat suit makers Lakeland Industries
could potentially benefit from owing this domain name; “No one calls
Lakeland (LAKE)
speculators ‘merchants of disease.’” he notes. Aiming to profit during a
crisis is nothing new; companies such as Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Boeing (BA) make billions of dollars in profits in the business of war. “
A second healthcare worker in
Dallas has been diagnosed with the Ebola Virus after providing care to
Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from the disease last week. This is the
second person-to-person transmission so far in the U.S.. Both are
healthcare workers who were exposed caring for Duncan, who came to the
US after contracting the disease. “To me the real outrage is that the
Dallas nurses weren’t given the right instructions, that this guy was
sitting in the emergency room for a long period of time and not
quarantined” says Task.
The World Health Organization
says over 8,000 people have likely been infected with the disease and
over 4,000 to have died so far. The Center For Disease Control calls
this Ebola Outbreak, which began in West Africa but has spread to seven
counties, the largest in history.
Yahoo celebrity
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