October 2, 2014, - 5:23 pm
MUST READ: Obama’s America Deliberately Glib, Naively “Optimistic” on Ebola
Obama and the rest of our LINOs (Leaders In Name Only) are wildly, recklessly “positive” and glib on the potential for destruction by Ebola in America.
While I don’t agree with this guy that America doesn’t spend enough on public health (we spend way too much and it’s wasted) or that we need to send more money and troops to Africa (no, we need to spend more energy and deliberate action on tightening our borders and slowing immigration–but we’ll never do either), everything else in this excellent op-ed in today’s USA Today by David J. Dausey is SPOT ON regarding Ebola and other similar disease. “Think positive” is NOT a solution and won’t keep us safe. Dausey is dean of the School of Health Professions and Public Health at Mercyhurst University. Much of this won’t be new to those of us paying attention, including the facts about mutation, etc. (Ebola may have already mutated on U.S. soil. We’ll never know until it is too late.) But this is a cogent, comprehensive, and concise statement of the incompetence of the Obamaniks on this problem. The headline of this piece in the print editions of the paper was better: “Naive Optimism Won’t Protect You From Ebola: Politicians Downplay the Real Risks.”
Same as It Ever Was (Follow Me on Twitter) . . .
Even after the arrival of Ebola in Texas, the national dialogue in the United States remains naive, overly optimistic and full of misleading assurances from elected officials and public health experts. What the public needs to know and understand is this: Ebola is a deadly virus and like all viruses it can and will mutate and change.
Right now the disease only spreads from person to person by bodily fluids but there is a possibility that could change and the disease could become airborne. If it does, we could face a public health challenge like we haven’t seen in this country since smallpox or polio. Worse yet: even if Ebola doesn’t mutate, there is a good chance that some other novel infectious disease that we know about now (or will find out about in the future) will cause a pandemic and result in a significant loss of life. The public needs to be cognizant of these real and present dangers to calibrate their expectations about the limited capabilities of our health care and public health systems and to increase our community resilience to deal with these threats.
We currently have an overconfident view about the capabilities of our health care and public health systems in this country. This overconfidence comes in part due to willful ignorance and in part due to leaders who want the public to believe they’ve got things more under control than they actually do. . . . There is no other way to slice it — our public health system is not ready to deal with a challenge like Ebola if the situation takes a turn for the worse.
Americans also have an overconfident view of our health care system as a whole. The reality is that the surge capacity of our existing health care system is limited and any large-scale disease outbreak could overwhelm that system. While we have plans to use portable pop-up hospital tents and beds to expand surge capacity, we haven’t yet figured out how to create pop-up nurses and doctors to staff them. In addition, infection control in our hospitals is a concern. The SARS outbreak demonstrated just how hard it is to prevent the spread of some infectious diseases and how easy it can be for those diseases to spread in hospitals despite our best efforts to contain them.
The most significant panacea that gets waved before the public is a miracle vaccine. Given our success with vaccines in Western countries, the public assumes that vaccines can be developed and administered quickly. This is a naive belief that doesn’t match with the facts. It could take a year or more to develop a vaccine for a novel infectious disease that could be ready for widespread use. In the interim, a disease would have free reign to spread through the population with a limited number of non-pharmacological interventions to stop it.
Our leaders seem to be so concerned about avoiding panic that they are willing to give the public any type of assurance to placate them. We were initially told that the current Ebola outbreak would be contained and wouldn’t be that large. Now we are being told that estimates put the number that could get the disease at more than a million.
I know “The Walking Dead” is a fantasy horror TV show and the comparison to the show may be overstating it. But maybe not . . . at least in terms of the amount of death and the degree of power in the contagion. It will spread quickly if it is not kept under control.
And since we don’t exercise any sort of control at the borders–which is how Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian illegal alien with Ebola, got to Dallas–we can expect Ebola to spread and kill many Americans. And, like Mr. Dausey says, if not Ebola, then something else.
As I said yesterday, the incompetence at the U.S. Secret Service is not limited to a single law enforcement agency in the federal government. It’s an attitude pervasive throughout America–that we are invincible, that there is really no threat to us from outsiders who’ve made it inside, so we might as well do nothing and just let them in . . . whether that’s intruders at the White House or illegal aliens coming into our borders. “Don’t judge” and other similar BS that is fatal to our survival and even our very existence.
Heck, if I were Al-Qaeda or ISIS (which is really Al-Qaeda and was formerly AQI–Al-Qaeda in Iraq), I’d send a whole bunch of Al-Qaeda jihadists with American passports back to the homeland, once I injected ’em with the stuff. Then, I’d tell ’em to practice their future acts with the 72 Helen Thomases on live infidel and infidelette Americans.
He may be in a watery grave, but the ghost of Bin Laden is having the last laugh.
We don’t just have “The Walking Dead” Prez. We have “The Walking Dead” populace that elected him and is too busy Keeping Up with the Kardashians and gushing over Clooney’s wedding to a Jew-hater.
Good luck, America. But luck won’t save you.
Tags: Ebola, Thomas Eric Duncan
erste!
kirche61 on October 2, 2014 at 5:43 pm