quarantine – Moe Lane

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.

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.