Tag: ebola

If Ebola-treating medical personnel won’t self-quarantine, they must be quarantined anyway.

This passage from Hot Air sums up the current administration-friendly rhetoric over Ebola and quarantines nicely.  Short version: the nurse who went overseas to treat Ebola patients, came back, had a fever, got isolated while they tested her, was released to Maine, and announced that she would be the judge of her own quarantining has just been told by Maine officials that no, they will be the judges.  In other words, it’s only going to be voluntary if the volunteer volunteers.  Hot Air is exasperated about the right thing, here:

In fact, there seems to be little that the administration and their media surrogates can agree on except for four things:

1. Chris Christie is a terrible person and we shouldn’t do anything he says.
2. Mandatory quarantines are insulting and bad for America.
3. We obviously need to go ahead and do exactly what Christie put in place.
4. But under no circumstances should we call it a mandatory quarantine.

And let me be blunt, for the record: if you went to West Africa to treat Ebola patients, thank you very much. I mean that, sincerely.  Good job.  Now go get into quarantine.  Because – again, bluntly – at this point I don’t really trust medical personnel to make smart decisions about their own health circumstances.  And forgive me for saying this*, but I have good reasons for that. Continue reading If Ebola-treating medical personnel won’t self-quarantine, they must be quarantined anyway.

Lame duck PotUS asks two 2016 contenders to reverse popular #Ebola quarantine proceedings.

One caved.

Well, when you put it that way (note: the NYT has since changed the text without noting those changes)…

The Obama administration has been pushing the governors of New York and New Jersey to reverse their decision ordering all medical workers returning from West Africa who had contact with Ebola patients to be quarantined, an administration official said on Sunday.

But both governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, stood by their decision, saying that the federal guidelines did not go far enough.

Yes, yes, we are all shocked to hear that Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie are not entirely willing to do Barack Obama – and, by extension, the Democratic party – a favor by relaxing quarantine procedures in their respective states.  Particularly since relaxing those procedures could put the citizens of both New York and New Jersey at terrible risk*.  The interesting thing here is that Cuomo’s position is protecting Christie’s, and vice versa: each one can claim, thanks to the other, that their decision is free from political considerations.  Which is of course absurd, but then Barack Obama’s position is even more tied into political considerations, so it all evens out in the wash. Continue reading Lame duck PotUS asks two 2016 contenders to reverse popular #Ebola quarantine proceedings.

Harry Reid’s Ebolan Roulette.

Specifically, the Surgeon General nomination.  Why is Vivek Murthy’s nomination stalled, again?  Well, as Byron York reminds us it’s primarily because Harry Reid wants it stalled:

It would take just 51 of the Senate’s 55 Democrats to confirm Murthy. But that confirmation has not happened. “There is bipartisan opposition, so Sen. Reid hasn’t even tried to bring him to a vote,” says another senior Senate GOP aide.

Consider this the fallout from Reid’s decision to partially nuke the filibuster (oh, I slay me): Harry Reid wanted the judges, and he figured that getting them was worth the embarrassment of having to occasionally scuttle the President’s more embarrassingly awful executive branch nominees. And Murthy is, indeed, embarrassingly awful: back in 2012 he rather infamously declared guns to be a “public health issue” – which is to say, Dr. Murthy wants to use the regulatory aspects of the State to do an end-run around that pesky Constitution thingy and ban guns that way.  Which is why civil rights groups have made their opposition to Dr. Murthy crystal clear – and why Harry Reid has allowed Murthy’s nomination to languish in the bowels of the Senate*. Continue reading Harry Reid’s Ebolan Roulette.

Tweet of the Day, Republicans ABSOLUTELY Need To Establish A Travel Ban Position NOW edition.

Can’t add to, or subtract from, this:

…unless it’s to add this: Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Republicans ABSOLUTELY Need To Establish A Travel Ban Position NOW edition.

Umm… don’t they make that Ebola vaccine from tobacco?

So why is the UN/WHO going forward on taxing the stuff? “As we reported at the beginning of the month, the United States is sitting out the World Health Organization’s (WHO) conference in Moscow where they will discuss massive new taxes on tobacco products – and potentially e-cigarettes as well – in all nations who have signed on to their treaty.” Mind you, the USA didn’t sign onto that treaty, so maybe it won’t have that much effect on things; but you’d think that the international community might want to think things throu…

:pause:

Yeah, right, never mind.

Our Healthcare situation, in two tweets.

Yikes…

…and yikes.

Although there certainly should be no panic about the latter point. The case is definitely problematical, but there’s no indication that there’s a respiratory form of the disease, which is the scenario that really scares everybody. What we have here is a nasty disease that can be fought.