Hmm, well, some points I'd like to emphasize. Lessee how this plays out for y'all:

The industry establishes that there's this big problem with some illness, be it a cold virus, some antibiotic resistant bacteria, or cancer. They say they want to study it so they can maybe find a way to protect us from it, so we agree to pay more taxes to the government to fund these studies. Wanting to improve our quality of life, we gladly agree to put for the money, after all, it is only a little bit more than we are already paying for our government to waste on other things we don't really need but think we have to have. Also, look at all the wonderful advances medical science has made in the past hundred years because our civilization collectively supported these studies (or so they would have us believe).

So years go by, and we keep getting told that progress is being made, that we are learning more and more about how the diseases work and that it is only a matter of time, but that they need more money to continue their research. So we pay, because everyone wants to live to be 200 years old. Hmm, sounds to me like a pretty good setup. Well, so much for my conspiracy theory of the day.

I am also reminded of the Whitman tragedy. Apparently the native americans, at least some of them, would hold the medicine man of their tribe responsible for the welfare of the tribe. If a disease started killing the members off and the medicine man couldn't stop it, he could end up being sacrificed.