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Ebola, Etc: FUBAR SNAFU Charlie-Foxtrot

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NOTE: These posts are not an attempt to be comprehensive in coverage of the Ebola story, nor of the Polio story.  They just contain some items that have caught my eye [which is still not hemorrhaging blood, I’m happy to report — that only happens when I look at Al Sharpton].

I hadn’t planned on doing another one of these so soon after last nights, but this new reality show, America’s Got Disease, is living life in the fast lane…

-The VodkaPundit, Stephen Green, is not worried about Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever becoming widespread in America:

I don’t expect an Outbreak scenario. Nobody is going to have to nuke Dallas. Hemorrhagic fevers are so nasty that outbreaks burn themselves out before they can become pandemics. The only reason so many have died in Africa is the tragic irony that the part of the world least able to cope with an outbreak is also the part of the world the virus calls home.

Wait — did I say “tragic irony”? That sounds more like a tragic necessity; a virus will always make its home in the best possible host.

For all those reasons, ebola just isn’t something I spend much time worrying about.

Commentator Subotai Bahadur, whose opinion I have come to respect greatly, begs to differ:

In Africa, Ebola burned itself out because its vectors largely had a limited number of people to be in contact with [small villages] and limited mobility [Shank’s Mare for the most part in the back country, then ground vehicle speeds, but a relatively low number of them]. That limited the pool of possible hosts and is why it burned out. It is out of the back country and into cities where there are more people in constant contact, more transportation, and access to the whole bloody world, including us.

Once it got here, we are one of the most mobile people in the world. Damn near everyone has a car which gives transcontinental range. Mass transit and airlines are everywhere. Our food comes from around the world through a limited number of choke points, and our retail establishments are called mass marketing for a reason. An R0 of two, which is where we are at a minimum, means a logarithmic rise in infections UNLESS there are measures to limit contacts, limit access of new vectors to our population, and quarantine infectious people and at the very least the first circle of their contacts.

All of which is not only not being done, it is being actively opposed by the full weight of the Federal government and the mass media. And the government is also opposing the level of precautions [Level 2 Biological Safety Procedure: gown, gloves, mask, and face shield have proved in practice to be insufficient from the actual patient data. Level 3 has independent air supply. And no, not because it is necessarily “airborne” by the technical definition, although the jury is still out. “Aerosolized”, which is what this is, acts the same as “airborne” at treatment ranges.] that experience shows is necessary. Along with dragging their feet on quality control for the Level 2 equipment, which apparently is ill-fitting and shoddy.

It looks to me like the government is deliberately giving me cause to worry. There is a point where incompetence becomes statistically impossible, and deliberate acts are the most rational explanation. I believe that the tipping point has been reached.

With this national government we have, chock-full of Leftists in every nook and cranny and run by coffee-house philosophers, such speculation is reasonable.  We’ve come to this.

-Another commentator in the same post, OriginalFool, remarks:

What worries me is all the lies we are being expected to swallow.

The CDC director, Tom Frieden, has come up with some whoppers.

In congressional testimony he claims that we are tracking all the people that arrive on airplanes from the affected regions of Africa. Given 100-150 people per day and 21 day incubation, that is 2-3,000 people. Does anyone believe we are actually tracking that many people? We are having trouble tracking the 100 or so known contacts from Duncan.

Also in that testimony, he claimed that the second nurse “did not report any symptoms” when she called to see if she should take an airplane trip. This was immediately after he said she called because she had a fever. Apparently he is unaware that a fever is a symptom.

He has said that the first nurse caught Ebola because of a breach of protocol, but is unable to point to any breach of protocol. The fact is that she probably contracted the disease when “face shields” was “the protocol”. That protocol has since been changed, but you cannot violate a protocol that has not yet been created.

The biggest problem I have is that with so many transparent lies, it is getting really difficult to trust anything that is said.

Exactly.

And even the dimmest bulbs are starting to realize that, which means we are in danger of experiencing a Panic.  That is something that is exactly what we do not need right now.

-Geoffrey Britain understands the Leftist Mindset at work here:

[Obama] did indeed cancel his fundraiser and call a cabinet meeting and, they did NOTHING. So, either he overcame his ‘panic’ or he’s paralyzed with fear.

Could it be that rather than panic, the ‘optics’ demanded he appear to be concerned? Could it be that Obama knows exactly what he’s doing regarding Ebola and that he’s taking a calculated risk in order to keep our southern borders open as long as possible, seeking to create a legacy as the man who brought the democrats a permanent majority?

After all, if a few thousand Americans die before an Ebola epidemic is contained, that would just be collateral damage, ‘regretfully’ necessary to the greater good that social justice demands.

-Some Tweets:

Tip of the fedora to Instapundit.

Tip of the fedora to Donald Douglas.

Ernst Schreiber:

You could probably make the case that the reason our response to Ebola, like our response to so many of the social ills that ail us, is because our elites learned from the wrong dead white guys.

Marx, Lenin, Sorel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Mussolini, De Man, Derrida, Foucault, Sartre.

-In last evening’s post, I quoted from Richard Fernandez quoting from an article by James Jay Carafano regarding Woodrow Wilson’s bad mishandling of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1919.  Ed Driscoll quotes from the same article and adds some fine analysis [this is worth quoting nearly in full]:

The recently retired president’s administration and its lackeys have made lots of errors regarding their handling of the Ebola crisis, of course. But at the National Interest, James Jay Carafano spots what he considers to be the big one:

The White House has declared Ebola to be a top national-security concern. That ought to worry Americans. The last time a president tried to make a disease a national-security issue, he helped trigger a global pandemic that killed 50 million people.

Progressives like to expropriate the label of national security to help drive their agendas. Statist, centrally managed, with top-down direction, the national-security model is the perfect vehicle for any policy “crusade,” be it fighting global warming or raising taxes. Thus, for example, when the administration got the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to label the “debt the biggest threat to national security,” it had all the cover needed to press for cutting defense and raising taxes—two cornerstones of President Obama’s progressive political agenda.

But playing “national security” progressive politics with public health can bring outright disaster. When the United States entered World War I, Woodrow Wilson played the national-security card early and often. The war effort became an excuse for everything from jailing political opponents to spying on everyday Americans. But, when the president used a global war as an excuse to preempt sound public-health policy, he reaped a global catastrophe.

In a post titled “Ebola and the great forgetting: the best of times, the worst of times,” Neo-Neocon quotes from a PBS documentary on how the Spanish flu ravaged America during this period:

Narrator: In 31 shocking days, the flu would kill over 195,000 Americans. It was the deadliest month in this nation’s history. Coffins were in such demand that they were often stolen. Undertakers had to place armed guards around their prized boxes. The orderly life of America began to break down. All over the country, farms and factories shut down — schools and churches closed. Homeless children wandered the streets, their parents vanished…

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The epidemic killed, at a very, very conservative estimate, 550,000 Americans in 10 months, that’s more Americans than died in combat in all the wars of this century, and the epidemic killed at least 30 million in the world and infected the majority of the human species.

Narrator: As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.

Dr. Alfred Crosby, author, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: It is in the individual memory of a great many of us, but it’s not in our collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery: how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous, so massively horrendous, as this, this epidemic which killed so many of us, killed us so fast and our reaction was to forget it.

It’s no surprise that someone being quoted on an NPR show can’t understand why this period of American history is so little known today. The left have been writing American history since the days of FDR, and have managed to airbrush virtually all of Woodrow Wilson’s sins out of American history, as they would reflect rather badly on the notion of “Progressive” or “liberal” government. Indeed, historian Fred Siegel writes that the American left stole the word “liberal” from traditional laissez-faire classical liberals in the early 1920s in order to cast off the taint of being associated with the disastrously “Progressive” Wilson administration.

After quoting from Carafano’s article, Moe Lane writes:

As the article notes, the eventual death toll for that was 50 million.  How many dead can actually be directly laid at Wilson’s feet is arguable – goodness knows that era did not lack for fools and knaves – but you can certainly tie his actions to the American soldiers and workers and patriots who died because they were at an event that was deliberately put on despite a quarantine.  Not that there’s any rush to do that; the whitewashing that they’ve done for Barack Obama pales in comparison to the cleanup that academia and the media have done on Woodrow Wilson’s reputation…

And with the Ebola crisis risking expansion, future historians may well need to do Wilson-level airbrush work erasing Obama’s actual presidential record out of the history books.

That is, if The West survives this Age Of Leftist Hegemony — and that is very much in doubt at this point.

-This Administration really, really loves to go after female nurses.

From Bryan Preston, we learn:

…the Obama CDC is looking into blaming Ebola nurse #2 for getting on that commercial airplane that the CDC allowed her to get on. Fox got wind of that blame game move today.

White House correspondent Ed Henry reports that the CDC now says that Amber Joy Vinson was “not entirely forthcoming” about the fever that she had before boarding that flight from Cleveland to Dallas.

It’s difficult to see how that could be the case. The CDC itself reported that her fever was 99.5 and that it therefore did not meet the CDC threshold of 100.4. The CDC knew that Vinson had been exposed to Ebola. What could she have withheld when she called the agency, more than once, to see if she would be allowed to fly?

#WarOnWomen, indeed.

-What would one of these posts be if I didn’t provide one of the latest examples of Friedenian Logic, with some bonus commentary of Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH: Here is, by the way, Thomas Frieden.  This is yesterday afternoon.  This is the how-you-can-give-it-on-a-bus-but-you-can’t-get-it-on-a-bus sound bite, and I realized some of you might have thought I was making this up.  I mean, that’s how ridiculous this is, and I just want to play the sound bite.  I assure you I’m not.  It was during the Q&A after they had their teleconference with reporters yesterday on the latest to do with Ebola.

A reporter said, “In a video message to countries in West Africa that are experiencing Ebola outbreaks, President Obama told residents in these countries in West Africa that they can’t get the disease by sitting next to somebody on a bus.  Did the CDC vet that message before it was released and posted on US embassy websites, and is it true that a person runs absolutely no risk of contracting Ebola on public transportation such as a bus?”

FRIEDEN: Yes, CDC vetted the message — and, yes, we believe it’s accurate.  I think there are two different parts of that equation.  The first is, uh, “If you’re a member of the traveling public and are healthy, should you be worried that you might have gotten it by sitting next to someone?” and the answer is, no.  Second, uh, “If you are sick and you may have Ebola, should you get on a bus?” and the answer to that is also, no.  You might become ill!  You might have a problem that exposes someone around you.

RUSH:  Wait, pal, you just said… It’s only a 30-second sound bite! You just said 25 seconds ago that can’t happen!  He’s doing this every time he opens his mouth.  He is contradicting himself.  I think this may be a record.  This time it was in 30 seconds….

-That’s all for now.  Stay away from the buses.



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