Why is the Ebola response so inept?

[William Thornton]

I once was on the ATL airport subway next to a former CDC director. While I didn't initiate a conversation with her, I thought I would have said merely, "You're in my prayers" since the job pressures in times of crisis are severe.

The current director, an Obama appointee, is looking more and more overwhelmed by circumstances and less and less capable of managing the thing. Predictably, the WH is to appoint an Ebola czar, a political person, to manage things. Are we managing the Ebola health care crisis or the political fallout therefrom? One hopes, the former.

Obama is characteristically behind events and while some critics make political hay from the latest crisis, it's hard not to see the administration as inept in this even if they didn't cause it.

[Haruo]

The advantage of appointing a Czar for this that or the other crisis topic is that when one's efforts fail you only have to shoot one person.

[Haruo]

[Ed Pettibone]

[William Thornton]

Part of the political system...sort of like
Bush and Katrina.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Sandy]

It's an assumption that the response is "inept." Compared to what? We've never responded to Ebola before. Seems that most of the "ineptness" was with the hospital in Dallas. The CDC handled three prior cases, sent two to Emory, where there was a hospital equipped to handle it, and one to Nebraska, under similar circumstances, without any spreading of the virus. The "ineptness" here seems to be in Texas, in the once outstanding Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, now the corporate owned Texas Health Presbyterian, and in that local governments response. If you saw the county judge executive's statement, the one he made when he more or less walked away from questions, his attitude was "We is gonna handle this ourselves down here, we don't need no federal hep, and we ain't gonna let Obama tell us what we gonna do!" That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the ineptness in this case.

On the contrary, unlike other government "ineptness" i.e. attacking and invading the wrong country in response to 9-11, Katrina response, the banking crisis, the response to this seems to be pretty well thought out and anticipates as much as could possibly be anticipated. The plan has been first of all to bring the assistance of the US to bear in setting up field hospitals and sending troops and aid workers into West Africa, to deal with the crisis head on, and provide resources to prevent it from spreading further. Good move. Yeah, conservatives squealed about the cost, and their solution, to seal off West Africa and prevent travel from there, would have doomed tens of thousands of people, and only made it more difficult to track those with the disease, since a travel ban would only have pushed people to go to countries where they could enter the US, many of them sick and contagious by then. The three West African countries involved are screening travelers, with US help, they now have the resources to be effective.

It looks to me like Texas Health Presbyterian dropped the ball on this one, leaving a mess for the administration to clean up. As it is, there are only two other cases of Ebola related to the Texas case, which is remarkable considering the potential. I fully expect right wing extremists to turn this into political rhetoric as they do everything else, and then hide their own lack of reason and intelligence behind some other argument. Their way of handling it is to isolate it, refuse to help because of the risk of contamination, and consign thousands to death because, well, after all, Americans are more valuable and important as a people than West Africans are, right?

[Dave Roberts]

We need a Surgeon General, but Congress has not confirmed a nominee. This was a place where a surgeon general would be the point person. Where is today's C. Everett Koop?

[Haruo]

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

Clearly, the inept response of the administration harms them politically; hence, a political guy appointed to manage the crisis and minimize political fallout. I'm not sure how the gummit could be "brought down" since we don't have a parliamentary system. The current admin could certainly be stymied in its legislative actions, and should be in most cases.
Democrats act in the same manner.

[Neil Heath]

From FB:
"President Reagan ignored AIDS until 20,489 Americans had died, but tell me again how Obama's immediate response to 3 ebola cases has been inadequate." They point out AIDS was here in 1981, but he didn't address it until 1987.

Perhaps Obama hasn't been as immediate as they suggest, but I do believe he beats Reagan by a country mile.

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

...Bush's fault...

[KeithE]

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

[Haruo]

PS That was a true tour de force of smartphone editing. {{PROUD}}

[William Thornton]

Sorry, 911 et conspiracies thereabout should be in their own forum, the one we don't have yet for fringe subjects.

Platinum spur for Hauro who remembers the duck penis study. Sure, we could have cured Ebola, found Jimmy Hoffa, and put an American on Mars with the money gummit takes by force from families and wastes.

CDC gets over 6,000 million dollars. Can't they make do with that? It's the brain-dead DC system that when bureaucrats utterly fail they are rewarded for the same with more money.

The cure for Ebola is to put a gun to the head of working stiffs, take money ouf of their pockets, money that might have been used to buy food, clothing, housing, to pay for education, health care, and retirement savings and give it to failing bureaucrats whose average pay is already $80k/yr and who have little accountability in accomplishing what they are supposed to accomplish.

The Obama plan: CDC director has been unimpressive; so, put a political operative over the M.D. and fix the optics, we have an election coming up soon. We can fix Ebola after that.

[Dave Roberts]

[Sandy]

Essentially, the only people who think the government's response to the Ebola crisis has been "inept" are Republicans and right winger who buy into the crap that their slanted news media feeds them. Overall, most Americans don't evaluate the response as "inept," they simply state, in most reliable polls, that "more should be done." Of course, sending 3,000 military personnel and a boatload of medical teams to West Africa, which was criticized by Republicans, gets high approval marks, as does a plan to restrict travel from West Africa. Of course, people in polls don't always consider the consequences of immediate restrictive action, such as a travel ban, which would only scatter people trying to either escape the area, or seek medical care somewhere else.

The only "ineptness" in the US so far has been the response of Texas officials, wielding their "We don't need or want no stinkin' federal help" mantra, as one of their corporate giant health care systems botched the situation by trying to get by on the cheap. If they'd let the CDC in there at the outset, I bet they wouldn't be dealing with over 100 quarantines, and two infected nurses.

The fact that they are trying to turn this political smacks of desperation. This is a health crisis, not a political opportunity, so I guess the GOP cares less about the people affected than about the potential votes they might get as a result.

[William Thornton]

Sorry, Sandy. The dem talking points fail here. Ebola will cost Dems votes.

[Neil Heath]

Lest the CDC get accused wrongly of failure on this particular point, it was actually the head of the NIH (Collins, I think) who said that without the funding cuts caused by sequestration they might have been able to provide an Ebola vaccine by now.

[Sandy]

On the contrary, William, I see most people, on facebook and in opinion polls, as being put off by the attempts by Republicans and Tea Partiers to turn this issue into politics. I think it puts people off, and won't have an effect, or if it does, it backfires on them.

[William Thornton]

OK, Sandy. I love an optimist. Perhaps you will read this headline the first Wednesday in November:

"Democrats retain senate majority riding a reactionary wave against the politicization of the Ebola crisis."

We will know soon.