Via The New Yorker, an excellent October 16 article by John Cassidy: The Nightmarish Politics of Ebola, Part 2. Click through for the full article and many links. Excerpt:
According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, which was carried out before the latest developments, two-thirds of Americans are worried about a widespread Ebola epidemic, and more than four in ten are worried that they or a close family member will catch the virus.
From a scientific point of view, that’s pretty nuts. In a country with a population of more than three hundred million, just two people who haven’t travelled to West Africa have contracted Ebola, and they both treated Duncan when he was dying in an isolation ward.
It is well established that most victims of the disease only become contagious when they develop noticeable symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhea. So far as we know, the people who were with Duncan in a Dallas apartment after he arrived from Liberia and started to get sick appear to be fine.
When President Obama said on Wednesday, “It is not like the flu. It is not airborne.… The likelihood of widespread Ebola outbreaks in this country are very, very low,” he was only restating what virtually every health expert has been saying for months.
At this stage, though, such reassurances are wearing a bit thin. To many ordinary Americans, two Dallas nurses going down with Ebola is a serious outbreak of the disease, and they fear that it won’t remain confined to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Even granted that the current dangers of Ebola have been greatly overblown, this isn’t a wholly irrational posture. After all, in the early stages of any outbreak of an infectious disease, the chances of getting sick are vanishingly small.
It’s all very well for the Centers for Disease Control to call for calm. But with the news that Vinson contacted the C.D.C. before setting out for Dallas, public confidence in the agency and its leader, Tom Frieden, has taken another hit. (My colleague Amy Davidson has an excellent post on the questions raised by the Vinson story.)
On Thursday, Frieden went to Capitol Hill, where he said that he was “open to ideas” about keeping Americans safe, but didn’t unveil any new ones of his own. “We should not panic,” Frieden said. “We know how to stop Ebola outbreaks. The best way to stop Ebola is to fight it in Africa.”
At least one member of Congress, the Dallas Republican Pete Sessions, has already called on Frieden to resign. Ultimately, however, the C.D.C. director is just a federal bureaucrat. Political responsibility for the handling of the situation rests with President Obama, who acknowledged as much on Wednesday by cancelling a campaign trip, huddling with members of his cabinet, and emerging to call for the establishment of federal SWAT teams that would descend upon any hospital where an Ebola case is confirmed.
“We’re going to make sure something like this is not repeated,” Obama said. “Monitoring, supervising, and overseeing in a much more aggressive way than in Dallas initially.”
It was a headline-grabbing move; what it amounts to remains to be seen. The President’s problem is that he appears to be reacting to events rather than dictating them. Initially, his Administration resisted calls to screen visitors from West Africa; the day Duncan died, it announced a system of screening. Until yesterday, the White House insisted that the C.D.C. had established proper protocols and systems for hospitals dealing with Ebola victims. Now it is beefing up federal oversight and promising to fly in SWAT teams.
Will that be enough? In terms of fighting the disease and protecting health workers, we can only hope so. For political reasons, however, Obama will almost certainly have to do more—a point conceded by one of his former spokesmen, Jay Carney, who on Thursday advised the White House to reconsider its opposition to banning flights from West Africa.
“I think substantive actions need to be taken, and they may involve flight restrictions, they may involve moving all patients to specific hospitals in the country that can handle Ebola,” Carney told CNN. “I’m not an expert, but I think that would demonstrate a level of seriousness in response to this that is merited at this point.”
