“Ebola Politics”: Let Obama — And Frieden — Do Their Jobs
If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then even the possibility of infection with Ebola should do the same — for all of us. Instead we seem easily distracted by attempts to blame President Obama and scapegoat the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Republican politicians and media loudmouths demand the resignation of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC director, evidently because he refused to endorse a West African travel ban.
They’re all dead wrong.
First, Obama is following precisely the correct approach in addressing the outbreak with his order to dispatch American troops to Liberia. At this stage, no force except the U.S. military is capable of getting the situation in West Africa under control. The men and women of the medical corps can swiftly set up emergency tented facilities in every Liberian county, while security personnel begin to restore order and prevent panicked destruction.
The president didn’t foresee this outbreak, but neither did anyone else, principally because every earlier Ebola outbreak had been contained within a few rural villages. While his order to send troops isn’t popular – and nobody likes the idea of sending our troops into danger – he made a difficult but wise choice. (Our British and French allies have agreed to do the same in Sierra Leone and Guinea, respectively.)
Why are the unique characteristics and large scale of the U.S. military so vital now? Simply because no other force can adequately handle the logistical and safety requirements of this chaotic, perilous undertaking. To take just one example: Both our troops and the local health care workers will need an enormous supply of protective gear known as Personal Protective Equipment – each of which must be not just discarded, but carefully destroyed after a single use.
More broadly, the effort to contain Ebola needs very well-trained, well-organized, and well-disciplined people on the ground – which is to say, an army. Our military personnel are the best in the world, and will be able to provide leadership and guidance to the Liberians, organizing local health workers to restore order amid chaos and fear.
No organization except the U.S. military possesses the capacity to deal with such problems.
Second, the calls for Dr. Frieden to resign by Republican members of Congress more resemble cheap midterm campaigning than intelligent policymaking. Although the CDC has not functioned perfectly in the current crisis, its director is certainly the most qualified and experienced figure to stem a threatened outbreak of infectious disease. His expertise is not merely on paper, either.
During four of the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York, when multi-drug resistant tuberculosis was taking a terrible toll, Dr. Frieden oversaw the program that eventually controlled TB and reduced cases by 80 pecent. For five years he worked in India, dispatched by the CDC to work with the World Health Organization to control TB in that country – where his efforts helped to provide treatment for at least 10 million patients and saved as many as 3 million lives. Those are among the reasons that President Obama appointed him in the first place – and why he still deserves far more confidence than the partisan screamers in Congress and on cable television now attacking him.
Now is the wrong time for politicians and pundits to harass the Pentagon and the CDC, as they address the difficult task at hand — which will require many weeks of intensive struggle. There will be plenty of opportunity for recriminations later, if that still seems necessary.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the country faced what felt like an existential crisis, many public figures, especially Republicans, urged everyone to put national unity and cooperation ahead of partisan bickering. It would be good if, just this once, they would follow their own advice.
What we will need in the months to come is a fresh assessment of our foreign aid programs. We need to understand why our traditional stinginess does both our country and our children a terrible disservice. Our best hope for survival, in the long term, is to notice how small our world has become – and to recognize that protecting our fellow human beings everywhere is the only way to protect ourselves.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, October 17, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Recklessness Spins Out Of Control”: To Assume Paul Has More Credibility Than Legitimate Medical Experts Is A Mistake
A couple of weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) started making appearances on far-right radio, questioning Ebola assessments from the actual experts, blaming “political correctness,” and raising threats that seemed plainly at odds with the facts.
Soon after, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institutes at NIH, appeared on CBS and was presented with the Republican senator’s assessment. “I don’t think that there’s data to tell us that that’s a correct statement, with all due respect,” the doctor said.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, it’s no longer clear just how much respect Rand Paul is due. My msnbc colleague Benjy Sarlin reported yesterday from New Hampshire, where the senator appeared eager to move the public conversation backwards.
Rand Paul had a message for students at Plymouth State University who had gathered for a pizza party with the Kentucky senator on Thursday: Ebola is coming for us all and the government is hiding the truth about the deadly disease. […]
“This thing is incredibly contagious,” Paul said. “People are getting it, fully gowned, masked, and must be getting a very tiny inoculum and they’re still getting it. And then you lose more confidence because they’re telling you stuff that may not be exactly valid and they’re downplaying it so much that it doesn’t appear that they’re really being honest about it.”
On CNN, Paul added, “If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they’re contagious and you can catch it from them. [The administration] should be honest about that…. You start to wonder about a basic level of competence.”
Yes, if there’s one person who has standing to whine about “a basic level of competence,” it’s the often confused junior senator from Kentucky – the one who’s deliberately contradicting medical experts, confusing the public at a difficult time.
To reiterate a point from our previous coverage, because Rand Paul has a medical background, some may be more inclined to take his concerns seriously on matters of science and public health.
With this in mind, let’s not forget that the senator, prior to starting a career in public office four years ago, was a self-accredited ophthalmologist before making the leap to Capitol Hill.
To assume Paul knows what he’s talking about, and that he has more credibility that legitimate medical experts, is a mistake.
Stepping back, though, there’s a larger context to consider, especially as the senator prepares for a national campaign. When the pressure is high and conditions get tense, the public can learn a lot about a potential leader. Do they maintain grace under fire or do they start to crack? Can they remain calm and responsible in the face of fear or do they run wild-eyed in misguided directions? Do they maintain their composure and keep a level head or do they encourage panic and anxiety?
The past couple of weeks have told us something important about Rand Paul, but none of what we’re learning casts the senator in a positive light.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2014
“Are You Ready For Some Terror?”: The Irrational Republican ISIS-Ebola Brigade
I don’t know if Ebola is actually going to take Republicans to victory this fall, but it’s becoming obvious that they are super-psyched about it. Put a scary disease together with a new terrorist organization and the ever-present threat of undocumented immigrants sneaking over the border, and you’ve got yourself a putrid stew of fear-mongering, irrationality, conspiracy theories, and good old-fashioned Obama-hatred that they’re luxuriating in like it was a warm bath on a cold night.
It isn’t just coming from the nuttier corners of the right where you might expect it. It’s going mainstream. One candidate after another is incorporating the issue into their campaign. Scott Brown warns of people with Ebola walking across the border. Thom Tillis agrees: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an Ebola outbreak, we have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border and secure it.” “We have to secure the border. That is the first thing,” says Pat Roberts, “And in addition, with Ebola, ISIS, whoever comes across the border, the 167,000 illegals who are convicted felons, that shows you we have to secure the border and we cannot support amnesty.” Because really, what happens if you gave legal status to that guy shingling your roof, and the next thing you know he’s a battle-hardened terrorist from the ISIS Ebola brigade who was sent here to vomit on your family’s pizza? That’s your hope and change right there.
Nor is it just candidates. Today the Weekly Standard, organ of the Republican establishment, published an article called “Six Reasons to Panic,” which includes insights like “even if this Ebola isn’t airborne right now, it might become so in the future,” and asks, “What’s to stop a jihadist from going to Liberia, getting himself infected, and then flying to New York and riding the subway until he keels over?” What indeed? This follows on a piece in the Free Beacon (which is the junior varsity Weekly Standard) called “The Case For Panic,” which argued that the Obama administration is so incompetent that everything that can kill us probably will.
Even if most people aren’t whipped up into quite the frenzy of terror Republicans hope, I suspect that there will be just enough who are to carry the GOP across the finish line in November. When people are afraid, they’re more likely to vote Republican, so it’s in Republicans’ interest to make them afraid. And you couldn’t come up with a better vehicle for creating that fear than a deadly disease coming from countries full of dark-skinned foreigners. So what if only two Americans, both health care workers caring for a dying man, have actually caught it? You don’t need facts to feed the fear. And they only need two and a half more weeks.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 17, 2014
“Despite The Non-Stop Coverage”: Surprise; Americans Are Confident In Government’s Ability To Handle Ebola
This morning the White House announced that Ron Klain, who was formerly the chief of staff to Vice President Biden, will coordinate the government’s response to Ebola. Klain will be the “czar” Republicans were asking for, I suppose because they had to demand the administration do something it wasn’t yet doing (thus is the nature of opposition). Which seems like a perfectly reasonable idea — you can never have too much coordination, and Klain is generally respected for his organizational skills.
But as much as Republicans have been arguing that everything is spinning out of control and the government isn’t protecting us from a deadly disease that might just bring about a zombie apocalypse, it turns out that the public isn’t going quite as crazy as you might think.
Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of people who are reacting irrationally to a disease that has so far infected a grand total of two people in this nation of 316 million, both of whom were health care workers treating a man dying of Ebola (if that doesn’t describe you, you’re safe). But the growing number of Ebola polls shows that the public actually has a pretty good amount of confidence that the government can handle this.
That’s not what you might think if you tuned into the panic-a-thon that is cable news, or even much other news. Every evening news show is leading with Ebola every night, and every newspaper has multiple stories every day about the disease. There’s a danger that we could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which the public is portrayed as losing their collective minds, which makes it more likely that they will end up doing so.
But let’s look at what they’re actually saying. It turns out that on some questions, partisanship has a big impact, which is actually encouraging in a way. It tells us that Ebola is much like other issues, where politics provides the filter through which things are being viewed. Whether it’s the economy or health reform or national security, Republicans are always going to be less likely to express confidence in the ability of a government run by Democrats to do anything right (and vice-versa).
So, via Eric Boehlert, in the latest Washington Post poll, 62 percent of respondents said they were very confident or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to respond to an Ebola outbreak. Among Democrats, the number was 76 percent, while among Republicans it was a still-healthy 54 percent. A Pew Research Center poll taken two weeks ago found something similar: 69 percent of Democrats said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the government’s ability to handle Ebola, while 48 percent of Republicans agreed. Pew pointed out that in 2005, when George W. Bush was president, the same question was asked about bird flu and the numbers were reversed (with Democrats then expressing even less confidence than Republicans do now).
That tells a story not of widespread public hysteria but of rather ordinary partisanship. And a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll also shows a more reasonable public than you might expect if you were just watching the panic-a-thon on cable news. Among the questions Kaiser asked was this:
Which do you think is more likely: Ebola will spread and there will be a widespread outbreak in the U.S.; or Ebola will be contained to a small number of cases in the U.S.?
Ebola will be contained: 73
There will be a widespread outbreak: 22
And people in both parties expressed confidence in the Centers for Disease Control, with 79 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans saying they’d have confidence in the CDC to contain the disease and prevent if from spreading if there were a case of Ebola in their area.
As a news story, Ebola lends itself perfectly to sensationalistic, ratings-grabbing news. It’s mysterious, threatening, dramatic, and carries the theoretical potential for global disaster. But so far, despite the non-stop coverage and Republicans’ insistence that chaos reigns, most of the public seems to think that our government is capable of handling it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 17, 2014
“You Don’t Need A Hazmat Suit”: Want To Help Combat Ebola? Get A Flu Shot
On Friday morning, the Obama administration announced that it was appointing Ron Klain, the former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, to become the Ebola “Czar” to oversee all efforts to combat the disease. This isn’t much of a surprise. After all, the president told reporters Thursday night that he would consider making such a move. But there is another, much more subtle message, hidden in this move: Get a flu shot.
When he spoke to reporters Thursday, Obama expressed complete satisfaction with his current team overseeing the Ebola response: Thomas Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of the Health and Human Services, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. But each of those four have other duties as well. Monaco and Rice are both heavily involved in coordinating the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
For Frieden and Burwell, their attention will soon be partially diverted to flu season. “We’re going into flu season, which means, by the way, that people should be looking to get their flu shots,” Obama said. “We know that every year tens of thousands of people potentially die of the flu, and a hundred-thousand or more may be actually going to the emergency room and hospitalized because of the flu. So that’s something that Tom [Frieden] also is responsible for.”
As I noted Friday morning, there is no reason to fear Ebola. You don’t need to wear a hazmat suit when you travel. But if you are feeling helpless and want to do something to help combat the disease, get a flu shot. The symptoms for the flu—fever, nausea, vomiting—are very similar to those of Ebola. That means the more people who get the flu this year, the more people are going to panic about potential cases of Ebola, cases that the vast, vast majority of the time will prove false. Reducing the number of people who get the flu will help quell that panic.
And, by the way, the flu killed 50,643 Americans in 2012. That’s another very good reason to get a flu shot.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, October 17, 2014
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