#121 Obama and Ebola

October 27, 2014

Obama’s anti-quarantine argument is this: ““The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa.” This was stated by his mouthpiece, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. What, exactly, is this institute? It is a government funded organization receiving several billion dollars annually from the U.S. taxpayers. Listening to Fauci does not persuade that this money is well spent.

I don’t want to argue the wisdom of quarantine, though it seems so obvious as to be painful. Only social science masters of the counter-intuitive could question the usefulness of quarantine, but that’s not my issue here.

What bothers me about this line coming from Obama and his henchmen is that the identical argument could be made about Isis. Indeed, Bush did make exactly this argument about fighting in, first, Iraq, and then Afghanistan. He said that it was important to fight them there because otherwise we would wind up having to fight them here. His strategy might have worked had Obama actually followed it.

Instead, Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq and he’s in the process of pulling them out of Afghanistan, and we are now having to fight Islamic terrorists on our own soil. On the other hand, he actually did “put boots on the ground” in Africa to fight Ebola. Clearly, he’ll use troops for anything except what they were meant to do, which is to protect the interests of the U.S.A..

So if the brilliant Obama believes his own anti-quarantine argument, he probably should have kept troops in the Middle East to fight the Islamic terrorists. Isis is precisely political Ebola. Conversely, if he was persuaded by his reasons, whatever they might have been, for pulling out of the Middle East, he probably should be quarantining against Ebola and leave our soldiers here.

For my own part, operating without the handicap of government funded instructions, it seems that 1) we should quarantine returners from West Africa (best to err on the side of caution), 2) we should send the people from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to West Africa where they can work on stopping the  epidemic (may as well get some use out of them — but quarantine them when they return), and 3) we should get our military busy in Iraq and Syria sterilizing the area of Isis terrorists.