by Sandy » Fri Oct 17, 2014 3:48 pm
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?