“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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