The absolute hysteria surrounding the Ebola crisis underscores what is wrong with our politics and the policies they spawn.
On Ebola, the possible has overtaken the probable, gobbling it up in a high-anxiety, low-information frenzy of frayed nerves and Purell-ed hands.
There have been nine cases of Ebola in this country. All but one, a Liberian immigrant, is alive.
We aren’t battling a virus in this country as much as a mania, one whipped up by reactionary politicians and irresponsible media. We should be following the science in responding to the threat, but instead we are being led by silliness. And that comes at heavy cost.
The best way to prevent Ebola from becoming a pandemic is to stop it at its source — in West Africa, where the disease is truly exacting a heavy toll with thousands dead and thousands more infected. But the countries in that region can’t do it alone. They need help. The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, said on Tuesday, “We’ll need a steady state of at least 5,000 health workers from outside the region” to fight Ebola in West Africa. That means health care workers from other countries, including ours.
Many of our health care workers are heroically heeding the clarion call. They are volunteering to head into harm’s way, to put their own lives on the line to save others and to prevent the disease from spreading further. But upon returning to this country some now risk “mandatory quarantine” even if they test negative for the disease and are asymptomatic. (Ebola can be spread only when a patient expresses symptoms.)
The public face of the affront to basic science, civil liberties and displays of valor has become the nurse Kaci Hickox. She accepted an assignment with Doctors Without Borders in Ebola-plagued Sierra Leone. But upon returning to the United States, she was quarantined in a plastic tent in a Newark hospital even after testing negative for the virus. She has been transferred to Maine, but there is a state trooper stationed outside the house where she’s staying.
Hickox is a paladin being treated like a leper.
As Hickox wrote in the Dallas Morning News:
“I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.”
It would be bad enough if there were just a momentary inconvenience or a legally contestable rights infringement. But it may be more than that. It could deter other health care workers like Hickox from volunteering in the first place.
In other words, irrational governors, like Chris Christie of New Jersey, taking ill-advised steps to control the spread of the disease on a local level could help it to spread on a global one.
That is in part why overly aggressive state-level restrictions have been roundly condemned.
A spokesman for the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said this week:
“Returning health workers are exceptional people who are giving of themselves for humanity. They should not be subjected to restrictions that are not based on science. Those who develop infections should be supported, not stigmatized.”
But stigma feels right as rain for some folks.
When Dr. Kent Brantly, a missionary caring for Ebola patients in Liberia, became the first known American Ebola patient, Ann Coulter called him “idiotic” and chastised him for the “Christian narcissism” of deigning to help people in “disease-ridden cesspools” rather than, say, turning “one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ,” which would apparently “have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia.”
Oh, the irony of Coulter using this flummery to blast Brantly as idiotic.
This that’s-their-problem-we-have-our-own reasoning is foolish and illogical. It somehow neglects the reality that oceans are not perfect buffers and that viruses, unchecked, will find a way to cross them.
And it reveals a certain international elitism that is not only disturbing but dangerous.
As the World Health Organization’s director general, Dr. Margaret Chan, recently pointed out: “The outbreak spotlights the dangers of the world’s growing social and economic inequalities. The rich get the best care. The poor are left to die.”
Chan also pointed out that there is no vaccine or cure for Ebola — some 40 years after it emerged — in part because “Ebola has been, historically, geographically confined to poor African nations.”
Ebola, like many other diseases, preys on the poor — poor countries and poor populations.
And, on the domestic front, it must not go unmentioned that elections are fast approaching and that politicians are acting — directly or not — out of political self-interest.
In that way, the federal response to Ebola becomes just another opportunity to argue that the federal government is ineffectual, incompetent and out of its depth, particularly under this president. And, in an election year, appearing to be more aggressive than the federal government, while riding a wave of fear, is appealing.
According to a report issued last week by the Pew Research Center, a sizable minority is concerned that Ebola will affect their families. The poll found that “41 percent are worried that they themselves or someone in their family will be exposed to the virus, including 17 percent who say they are very worried.”
Fear has become — and to some degree, has always been — a highly exploitable commodity in the political and media marketplaces. Both profit from public anxiety.
Christie, working feverishly to erase the memories of closed bridges and burned ones, has become the face of the politicians with hard head and heavy hands seeking hefty political reward from leveraging that fear.
He says his quarantine policy is just “common sense.” That’s just nonsense.