Thread: The Ebola rebellion The White House doesn't like being made to look bad by governors

Human Events

Surprise, surprise: The White House doesn't like being made to look bad by governors....




The Ebola rebellion
The governors of New York and New Jersey had the right idea, but they implemented it badly, and now the public probably trusts government to handle Ebola less than ever.
humanevents.com

The Ebola rebellion



By: John Hayward
10/27/2014 09:40 AM

On Friday, New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, and New York’s Democrat governor, Andrew Cuomo, jointly announced that they would impose mandatory quarantine procedures for health care workers returning to the United States after working with Ebola patients in Africa. This was, obviously, a reaction to the story of “Bowling for Ebola” doctor Craig Spencer, who ended his “self-isolation” period with a night on the town, while he was merely feeling “sluggish,” and then presented full-blown Ebola symptoms on the following day. There was a great deal of public concern that isolation for people exposed to the deadly disease was too important to be left to individual discretion and self-monitoring, concern that has been growing ever since the Texas Ebola drama included unnecessary travel by the infected nurses. If the call for mandatory quarantine was a powerful swing of the pendulum back toward caution, perhaps even excessive caution, it’s only because that pendulum had swung so far toward recklessness. Public health authorities and government officials have been wrong so many times about Ebola, so why not err on the side of caution?
The White House evidently didn’t like being made to look bad by a couple of state governors, so they went to work on Cuomo, and within 48 hours he had backed out of the Ebola Rebellion, declaring that self-isolation at home was just peachy after all. Christie largely followed suit once Cuomo folded his cards. The big change is that home-isolated persons will be independently monitored

The New York Times reports on the weekend chaos, which is not going to do much to reassure Americans that their immense multi-layered government has got this Ebola thing under control:

Facing fierce resistance from the White House and medical experts to a strict new mandatory quarantine policy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Sunday night that medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa but did not show symptoms of the disease would be allowed to remain at home and would receive compensation for lost income.
Mr. Cuomo’s decision capped a frenzied weekend of behind-the-scenes pleas from administration officials, who urged him and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to reconsider the mandatory quarantine they had announced on Friday. Aides to President Obama also asked other governors and mayors to follow a policy based on science, seeking to stem a steady movement toward more stringent measures in recent days at the state level.
The announcement by Mr. Cuomo seemed intended to draw a sharp contrast — both in tone and in fact — to the policy’s implementation in New Jersey, where a nurse from Maine who arrived on Friday from Sierra Leone was swiftly quarantined in a tent set up inside a Newark hospital, with a portable toilet but with no shower.
It was the second striking shift in Mr. Cuomo’s public posture on the Ebola crisis in 72 hours; after urging calm on Thursday night, then joining Mr. Christie to highlight the risks of lax policy on Friday, Mr. Cuomo on Sunday night appeared to try to dial back his rhetoric and stake out a middle ground.
He said his decision balanced public safety with the need to avoid deterring medical professionals from volunteering in West Africa. “My No. 1 job is to protect the people of New York, and this does that,” he said. Those quarantined at home will be visited twice a day by local authorities, he said. Family members will be allowed to stay, and friends may visit with the approval of health officials.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, sitting beside Mr. Cuomo at a news conference in Manhattan, nodded in approval, and praised the governor for developing a set of flexible quarantine guidelines that, the mayor said, would show proper respect to those required to abide by them.
After Mr. Cuomo’s announcement, Mr. Christie issued a statement saying that, under protocols announced on Wednesday, New Jersey residents not displaying symptoms would also be allowed to quarantine in their homes.

Later in the article we learn that both governors deny feeling any backstage pressure from the White House, even though everyone else seems to acknowledge such pressure was applied. Did neither of the governors game the politics of this move out? How could they not have realized they’d come under intense pressure from Washington for contradicting the Administration’s preferred Ebola narratives? Later in the article, the Times reports that “City officials, who were not consulted on the two governors’ decision, learned of it as the public did,” leading to a comical “room-to-room scramble” at City Hall. I assume they’re referring to New York City. That’s quite a testament to Cuomo’s brilliant leadership!
The quarantined, but not currently symptomatic, nurse mentioned above is named Kaci Hickox, and she did much care for mandatory quarantine. She railed against the policy on TV news cameras, and as the New York Post reports, her lawyers are even threatening to sue the state of New Jersey:

An Ebola nurse under mandatory quarantine in New Jersey fumed Sunday that she is being held in “inhumane” and “prison”-like conditions — and her lawyer vowed to file suit over her involuntary confinement.
Kaci Hickox told CNN’s “State of the Union” that she was stuck inside a tent without a shower or flushable toilet, despite having no symptoms and twice testing negative for the deadly virus after caring for patients in Sierra Leone.
Hickox, 33, also said she was being forced to wear paper scrubs, had no TV or reading materials, and was spending her time staring at the walls of the tent outside University Hospital in Newark,
“I am sure that we, as the United States, can come up with a fair and just policy for returning aid workers from Ebola-affected areas,” she said in an e-mail to The Post.
“But the policy enacted on me was no such policy. We must fix this now in order to ensure aid workers are protected so that this battle against Ebola in West Africa is won.”
Hickox, who was quarantined Friday, also told CNN she hasn’t been told how long she’ll be locked up, and started to cry when she described having no temperature or other symptoms of Ebola.
Hickox said she felt “like my basic human rights have been violated,” adding: “To put me in prison is just inhumane.”

She topped off her email to the New York Post with a selfie taken from inside her quarantine tent, because of course she did.
At the end of its article, the Post notes that the hospital claims Hickox “has computer access, use of her cellphone, reading material, and has requested and received food and drink,” which would suggest the nurse is dramatically exaggerating the hardships of her quarantine, unless the hospital is not telling the truth. (She obviously does have her smartphone, because she took a selfie with it. Smartphones provide access to the Internet and abundant reading material and other entertainment, as anyone killing time in an airport or doctor’s office could testify.) By Monday morning, Governor Christie had announced that Hickox would be discharged from the hospital.
This all seems like it was conceived and handled in the worst possible way, by everyone from the governors to the Administration. The whole Ebola Rebellion seems to have been cooked up in a mad dash to restore public confidence after Dr. Spencer’s Excellent Ebola Adventure by Governors Christie and Cuomo, who didn’t do much planning beyond checking with some lawyers to see if they had the power to impose such restrictions. Their subsequent handling of Kaci Hickox was pretty much guaranteed to produce a media-magnet sympathetic critic.
On the other hand, people with legitimate concerns about an outbreak are once again grinding their teeth as they watch the government and media put several agenda items higher on their list of priorities than “protecting the public from Ebola.” The reason medical authorities are blasting the New York and New Jersey quarantine protocol as “counter-productive” is that it will supposedly make American health care workers unwilling to travel to Africa to fight the disease, knowing of the hell they will face upon returning. Many observers will find themselves questioning the dedication of doctors and nurses who can handle hand-to-hand combat with Ebola in Africa, but not 21 days of isolation upon returning.
Surely a compromise for mandatory isolation can be reached, with more comfortable facilities made available to screened, non-symptomatic returning workers. The federal government rented out some fairly expensive facilities to house the illegal aliens who flooded across the southern border after President Obama’s executive orders for amnesty. How much would it cost to put together a decent halfway house for returning Ebola doctors, instead of giving them the treatment that made Hickox so upset? Even on short notice, state governments in New Jersey and New York should have been able to arrange something better than what she got.
The public strongly favors mandatory isolation of some kind for medical personnel returning from the Ebola hot zone. The Today show on NBC just did a flash poll that found 94 percent support for such isolation. Christie and Cuomo were probably looking at such measurements of public opinion when they announced their protocols on Friday. I suspect an equally heavy majority would disapprove of subjecting the quarantined individuals to pointless discomfort, and they’re probably not going to approve of an “emergency Ebola protocol” that turned into a public-relations meltdown.
Governor Christie appeared on Fox News Sunday to defend his quarantine policy, and made some interesting points about how he and Cuomo, as governors of states containing densely populated cities, thought it was necessary to ensure compliance with a mandatory isolation procedures. “I don’t believe, when you’re dealing with something as serious as this, that we can count on a voluntary system,” he said. “This is government’s job. If anything else, the government’s job is to protect the safety and the health of our citizens.”




Considering how much compulsive force federal and state governments have been willing to direct at much larger groups of Americans over far more trivial matters, imposing on a relatively tiny group of Ebola doctors and nurses for a few weeks doesn’t seem unreasonable. Unfortunately, the way Christie and Cuomo handled this made it seem unreasonable, and ill-considered, at least to the media and political elite… and by caving in over the weekend, they made themselves look less serious. The Beltway-media action line today is that the governors of New Jersey and New York overreacted and over-reached. I wonder if a great many ordinary people watching the show are scratching their heads and wondering why it’s so outrageous to ask people exposed to Ebola in Africa to chill out in mandatory, monitored isolation for a few weeks until it’s absolutely certain they are not infected. The elite is basically telling us we have to tolerate unnecessary levels of modest risk to demonstrate our fealty to Science.

Update: In a campaign appearance with Florida Governor Rick Scott, Governor Christie pushed back against critics of his Ebola policy, including quarantined nurse Kaci Hickox. “The fact of the matter is we’re going to protect the people of our state,” Christie told reporters. “And I think you saw yesterday that there’s confirmation that she’s being treated quite well in New Jersey. The CDC has been overseeing all the treatment that she has gotten in New Jersey and I’m hopeful that this morning if all goes well that we’ll be able to release her and send her back to Maine where she can continue to be quarantined in her home.”
“But the fact is I’m not going to step away for a minute from protecting the people of my state and our region,” Christie continued, before slipping in a little dig at Hickox’s complaints to the media. “So I understand that she didn’t want to be there. She made that very clear from the beginning but my obligation is to all the people of New Jersey and we’re just going to continue to do that. So the critics are the critics no matter what you do there will be critics and you don’t worry that, you worry about doing what’s right for the people you represent and that’s what we’ve done.” He even suggested that the nurse might come around to his way of thinking “when she has time to reflect.”



Whatever else you can say about Chris Christie, pro and con, he doesn’t hide under his desk when he takes heat from someone who has “sympathetic victim” credibility in the media.

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RedState

They are quite willing to kill as many people as it takes to prove their point.




NY and NJ Impose Ebola Quarantines; CDC and NIH Has a Cow
New York and New Jersey have imposed a quarantine on people who have recently been exposed to people with Ebola.
redstate.com



NY and NJ impose Ebola quarantines; CDC and NIH have a cow (UPDATED)

By: streiff (Diary) | October 27th, 2014 at 09:00 AM | 24



Having been burned to the ground by the CDC’s lack of candor, duplicity, and incompetence, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Christ Christie in joining Texas Governor Rick Perry and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in showing leadership that no political or health care leader in the federal government has shown. (UPDATE: I wrote this around 4pm yesterday. This was before Cuomo folded like a cheap suit under pressure from Obama and I saw the announcement that Illinois had joined the quarantine program.)
Reacting to the laissez faire attitude Ebola by a medical doctor who should have known better, Cuomo and Christie have enacted quarantine procedures for some travelers from countries with Ebola outbreaks:

The governors of New Jersey and New York said Friday they are ordering a mandatory, 21-day quarantine for all doctors and other travelers who have had contact with Ebola victims in West Africa.
The move came after a New York City doctor who returned to the U.S. a week ago from treating Ebola victims in Guinea was diagnosed with the lethal disease.
Many New Yorkers and others were dismayed to learn that in the week before he was hospitalized, Dr. Craig Spencer rode the subway, took a cab, went bowling, visited a coffee shop and ate at a restaurant.

Predictably, the people who have largely created the near panic atmosphere over Ebola are against the quarantine :

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday the mandatory quarantine for health workers returning to the United States from Ebola-stricken regions of West Africa is not “based on scientific data.”
“As a scientist and as a health person, if I were asked, I would not have recommended that,” Fauci said Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”

In light of the Spencer case, it is hard to see why this is even an item of contention. Ever since some obscure Greek composed a code for physicians the first principle of medicine has been “do no harm.” In response, Governor Chrisite said:

Christie defended his decision and those of the other states on “Fox News Sunday.” He pointed to experience with an NBC News crew that broke a voluntary self-quaratine after one of its cameramen came down with the virus.
“I have great respect for Dr. Fauci, but what he’s counting on is a voluntary system with folks who may or may not comply. We had this situation in New Jersey, Chris, as you know with the NBC News crew that said they were going to self-quarantine and then two days later they were out picking up takeout food in Princeton and walking around the streets of Princeton,” Christie said.
“I mean the fact of the matter is that I don’t believe that when you’re dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system. This is government’s job. If anything else, the government’s job is to protect the safety and health of our citizens. And so, we’ve taken this action and I absolutely have no second thoughts about it.”

What the actions of CDC Director Tom Frieden and the comments of Dr. Fauci underscore is the immense sense of self importance and entitlement in the public health community which is combined with a total disdain for the fears of the average citizen, fears which, in the main, have been caused by their own incompetence. If you want an example of this you have to look no further than an op-ed in the Dallas News by a nurse named Kaci Hickox:

I am a nurse who has just returned to the U.S. after working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone – an Ebola-affected country. I have been quarantined in New Jersey. This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me.
I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.

She is placed in quarantine and is not happy. She ends her piece by saying:

The epidemic continues to ravage West Africa. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that as many as 15,000 people have died from Ebola. We need more health care workers to help fight the epidemic in West Africa. The U.S. must treat returning health care workers with dignity and humanity.

Dignity and humanity, unnoticed by Hickox’s overweening sense of entitlement, work both ways. Dignity and humanity demand that you take whatever steps are necessary to ensure you don’t accidentally expose other people to a lethal disease. Dignity and humanity require that you realize you are not entitled to endanger others, as did NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman, because you feel inconvenienced.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but both CDC and NIH have adopted the view that they, not elected officials, govern the nation and that any act that contradicts them is lèse majesté. And they are quite willing to kill as many people as it takes to prove their point.
This situation has been brought on by the failure of the federal government to act. A travel ban, such as that enacted by virtually all African nations and Air France and British Airways would have eliminated the treat from all but the most determined lawbreaker. The quarantine imposed by New York and New Jersey could be easily obviated by the organizations, specifically MSF, conducting its own quarantine period in a designated location before their staff returns home. But this would all require the public health mafia to use common sense. It was clearly a bridge too far.

Tags: Andrew Cuomo, anthony fauci, cdc, Chris Christie, craig spencer, Ebola, New Jersey, New York, NIH, quarantine, travel ban

http://www.redstate.com/2014/10/27/n...paign=rsupdate

Obama Crushes State Ebola Quarantines

October 27, 2014


Windows Media

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. So let me see if I understand this. The states want to set up their own Ebola quarantines. Why would they want to do that? That's because they don't trust the federal government's quarantine protocols, right? That means they don't trust the CDC. That means they don't trust Obama, the Ebola czar, who has yet to make an appearance. They had a 27-member meeting, though, they had an Ebola meeting with 27 people, problem solved.



So one week before the election we have here a bunch of states that are deciding to do their own quarantines, and the Regime is flipping out. Obama and his gang are flipping out. They want to be in total control of the quarantines. So one week before the election, once again, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has caved. We need to quarantine Chris Christie is what needs to happen here, folks. This is the second election in a row. One week prior to the election, the governor of New Jersey ends up -- well, I don't know arm in arm, hand in hand, in bed with? I don't know how to characterize it, but responding to Obama's demands. I'm sorry. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but (laughing) I really think the Republicans ought to make sure that Governor Christie gets quarantined.
From now on, once we get to a week before an election, we need to find a way here. He finds himself in the middle here of taking center stage with another national crisis with another Obama hug moment. Governor Cuomo is doing the same thing, but that kind of makes sense because Governor Cuomo and Obama are in the same party. And yeah, I know, I've got Hillary. Hillary's at the top of the Stack, and we'll get to that. We're gonna get to all of it here today, folks. We've got, as is the usual case, a full load, if you will.
I hope all those people who complain about Barack Hussein O being such a hands-off president notice how quickly he acted to try to stop New York and New Jersey and Illinois from quarantining people coming back from Ebola countries. That was an impressive show of power, don't you think? Already Cuomo and Christie have been forced to cave before Obama's onslaught. So it's really clear that Obama can act, and he can act fast when it's something that really matters to him, such as making sure that people who might have Ebola aren't cooped up for 21 days. This is unbelievable to me. But it's happening right before our very eyes.

I mean, who are these governors trying to protect? The residents in their states? Who's trying to be protected here? They aren't doctors, these governors. They're not doctors. They have no background whatsoever. They're just political hacks. They should realize they need to concede any such decision to the Ebola czar. (interruption) I know the Ebola czar knows nothing about Ebola. I'm being facetious here. It all started with this nurse in New Jersey. She didn't want to be quarantined. "To hell with you! Do you remember Nancy Snyderman? You let her run around and go to the Soup Nazi place. Well, I want to do the same thing." It's totally classic. There's no adult in charge. The nurse says she's gonna hire a civil rights lawyer.
You know what I was thinking about earlier today, just a brief aside. You know how after every election we get a book? Somebody writes a book with all the things that happened in a campaign that we would have loved to have known during the campaign, but they withhold all that stuff for their book afterwards where it can't be of any use other than selling the book. So I want to know who is writing the Ebola book. When are we gonna find out the rest of this story?
Every time a scandal breaks, or every time Obama breaks something, I always wonder what reporter is withholding what we should know right now for his or her book that will come out after it's all said and done. A year after Obama leaves office we'll probably get the true story on amnesty, the true story on Ebola, and how they were all tied together from the Oval Office. But we will not know that even though there are probably people who know that and could document it now, we will not be told that. We'll be left to surmise that. And after the fact we'll get another book that explains all of these details.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Somebody help me out here. Is it just me, or didn't the CDC used to say that it was up to the state health departments to come up with how they were gonna handle potential Ebola patients? Didn't the CDC say that? It sounds familiar to me. I guess that's all out the window now. The states have no say in what they can or can't quarantine or who they can or cannot quarantine. But don't try to take a bag of oranges into California or you're gonna be facing jail time.



Don't you dare try to take your dogs to Hawaii. If you do that, your dogs are gonna be quarantined for 120 days. But somebody with Ebola coming back from an African country, somebody that's on the verge of that? "We can't! No way. We can't discriminate." You know why? You know why we can't do this? The whole argument against quarantining health workers coming back from Ebola countries is that doing that will discourage other doctors and nurses from going over to West Africa to help out.
You see? People will gladly put their lives on the line to try to help Ebola patients in Africa, but they won't put up with the inconvenience of being quarantined for 21 days in order to protect the lives of their family and others here at home. I can see that. I'm being sarcastic, for those of you in Rio Linda. Which leads me to another question. What is...? Boy, this is really thin ice. Maybe I shouldn't ask this question. No, I'll go ahead. I'll put it out there. What is the point in going to a western African country to help with Ebola, if, when you come back, you refuse or object to being quarantined so that if you're contagious, you will not spread the disease?
Why, if you're willing to go over there and help contain it, then why do you not wish to do the same thing when you get back? What's the point? Are these people just trying to show how good they are? We're good people, we care. What is this? Is it about them? Are they doing this to get noticed? Are they doing this for good <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym></acronym>? Are they doing this for image enhancement or are they doing it because they really believe in the cause? Governor Cuomo said if we quarantine you we will cover the wages that you will lose.
Anyway, it's all out the window now. Because Obama, this is in the UK Daily Mail. "Obama Forces Chris Christie into Embarrassing U-Turn to Allow Ebola Nurse to Leave New Jersey Quarantine Tent -- Chris Christie was forced on Monday to allow a nurse being kept in a tent in a hospital parking lot to go home after intense White House pressure to relax a mandatory 21-day quarantine the New Jersey Governor had imposed at a state level.
"The embarrassing turnaround came after Obama chaired a White House meeting on the rules and successfully lobbied Christie's New York counterpart, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to relax their quarantine rules -- even as Americans grow more concerned about the possibility of a pandemic emergency. Cuomo gave in on behalf of New Yorkers. But as of Sunday Christie was still pushing for more aggressive measures to protect New Jerseyans, saying he had 'no second thoughts' about the policy. Christie is a likely entrant into the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, and the intergovernmental Ebola skirmishes will provide both major political parties with new ammunition."
And that's why I say, here we are one week before an election, and once again we have a Republican governor caving or seeking to be seen arm in arm, hand in hand with the president of the United States. As I say, quarantine some governors, folks. I mean, really.
END TRANSCRIPT

Related Links

• UKDM: Obama forces Chris Christie into Embarrassing U-Turn to Allow Ebola Nurse to Leave New Jersey Quarantine Tent
• The Hill: Nurse Describes Ebola Quarantine Ordeal: ‘I was in Shock. Now I’m Angry’

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/20...la_quarantines