Discussion for article #229010
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have now called for the U.S. to ban individuals traveling from the countries impacted by the Ebola outbreak from coming into the U.S. if they are not American citizens.
Because, as we know, American citizens are exceptional and can’t catch Ebola.
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I guess if there were direct flights from the stricken countries,but I heard a discussion this morning that say’s that is not the case.
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This is the same guy who said this on a different show :
"WTF:
"WASHINGTON – A top official at the National Institutes of Health
disagreed on Sunday with the notion that an Ebola vaccine likely would
have been discovered by now had it not been for federal budget cuts.“I
won’t agree with that. I have to tell you quite honestly, I think that
the NIH has had constraints in resources for 10 years, and all the
biomedical research has been less than its robust activity,” Dr. Anthony
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But he
refused to speculate about what medical developments those constraints
may have prevented. "You can’t say that – I think you can’t say we
would or would not have this or that. Everything is slowed down, but I
wouldn’t make that statement.“Fauci was responding to the
suggestion from Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, that a decade
of budget austerity had slowed down research on vaccines and infectious
diseases, and perhaps had prevented an Ebola vaccine from being
developed and ready for the outbreak that has devastated West Africa.”
“[W]hen people come in from a country it’s much easier to track them if you know where they’re coming from,” he said about a travel ban on ABC’s “This Week.” “But what you do if you then completely ban travel there’s the feasibility of going to other countries where we don’t have a travel ban and have people come in.”
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We don’t have any direct flights to the afflicted countries. So that’s what’s happening now. Thomas Duncan came in from Belgium. There can be no such thing as a “travel ban” with the afflicted countries, because there’s no travel to ban.
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If someone in a city had something contagious, that individual would be quarantined. One doesn’t implement a quarantine by isolating everyone else EXCEPT the infected individual, unless, of course, you’re a bass-ackwards Republican (or a Democrat who thinks like one to suck up to dimwits in the run-up to the election.)
Bottom line: until we’re prepared to stop all commercial travel and shipping of goods from every location on earth, not just countries with predominantly black people in them, this call for a travel ban will be nothing more than political grandstanding to curry favor with the anti-intellectual fear-addled Honey-Boo-Boo electorate.
If, on the other hand, our objective is to quash the threat instead of sticking our collective head up our ass and hoping it all just goes away, we need to suck it up and get busy and not be distracted by this nonsense. Perhaps 50,000 people in the US alone die from influenza every year. Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we?
A great leader (oh, where are they now?) once said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  For all the shit Obama gets for allegedly lacking leadership, I’m not seeing any among the political class who level that critique. Rather, it’s been let no crisis pass unadvantaged.
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Since no flights from the affected countries go to the US the discussion is pointless. But it’s entertaining to see so-called “conservatives” demanding that jack-booted government thugs tell airlines where they can and cannot fly to.
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“Honey-Boo-Boo electorate.” Ouch !! LOL!!!
It’s speculation to say whether there would or would not be an Ebola vaccine absent one budget cut or another. A fortune has been spent over the last 25 years looking for an HIV vaccine and there isn’t one. Such budget cuts are bad-end of story, but we can’t tie them to a specific vaccine that does or does not exist.
The best current candidate is from a small Canadian government lab in Winnipeg. If it shows promise, NIH and big pharma could certainly help scale it up.
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Yep !!!
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But what you do if you then completely ban travel there’s the feasibility of going to other countries where we don’t have a travel ban and have people come in.
Like if you ban abortion… it doesn’t mean NO more abortions – just dangerous backroom abortions.
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Yes it will. Like every other issue goes away. Did we close the border with Canada during the SARS epidemic? I doubt you even remember SARS…
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Obviously it’s impossible to say for sure (and I’m not a virologist either), but I suspect it will be much easier to develop a vaccine for Ebola than HIV. HIV is difficult because it has to keep mutating in order to persist in the body at low levels for a long time, which it requires in order to spread. Ebola, like smallpox and influenza, spreads by multiplying faster than the body can catch it and causing severe sickness quickly, so it probably doesn’t change as much.
The main reason there isn’t an Ebola vaccine by now is that there hasn’t been pressure for one. Remember, the biggest outbreak before this only infected 425 people. There are dozens if not hundreds of other diseases, including those that affect tropical Africa, that were bigger concerns than Ebola until now (and unsurprisingly, diseases restricted to poor, remote areas tend not to attract much attention from big biomedical companies). Lassa fever, which causes very similar symptoms to Ebola, infects half a million and kills 5,000 every year - four times as many as had been killed by Ebola until the current outbreak.
Incidentally, there’s currently another, independent Ebola outbreak in the Congo. You don’t hear much about it because it’s in a remote area and only affecting a few people, similar to previous outbreaks.
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You “heard a discussion?” Get on a travel web site and find out for yourself. To save you the trouble, there are no direct flights from ebola infected countries to the US. However, it is not difficult to get here with a change of flight or two,and travel bans would have no effect on your ability to get here. If I thought I was exposed to ebola and thee was a travel ban, I’d take a bus to the closest country without a travel ban and book a flight to the US for US medical care. Fauci knows that. Cruz and pandering politicians will never figure it out.
I agree with everything you say. There are a lot of folks with 20/20 hindsight on Ebola, but the truth is, if, a year ago, you had asked a panel of experts to rank the top 50 health risks, Ebola would likely not have made the list.
I actually give the Canadian vaccine a fairly decent chance of working. If it does, then the main issues are scale-up, which are solvable.
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“[W]hen people come in from a country it’s much easier to track them if you know where they’re coming from,” he said about a travel ban on ABC’s “This Week.” “But what you do if you then completely ban travel there’s the feasibility of going to other countries where we don’t have a travel ban and have people come in.”
This is word salad. We can ban entry by anyone with a passport from a West African country or anyone with an entry stamp from those countries. Where they enter from is immaterial. If we should entertain such a ban is another story entirely.
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Most airlines have ceased travel to and from these countries already.
The US could revoke the visas of everyone living in the countries where the outbreak occurred, but that wouldn’t stop people from other countries from traveling to Liberia, back home, and then take a flight to the US. It also wouldn’t stop people who never went to Africa to come in contact with someone who has and then travel to the US. If the epidemic is allowed to go unchecked in Africa, it could eventually spread to the rest of the world, mostly in poorer countries and ultimately to wealthier countries, too. And then no travel ban is going to stop it.
The epidemic has to be stopped in Africa, and that’s what Americans should be concerned with, not the three case of the disease here. Anyone recall what Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”? The nobles cared little for the plague that was wiping out the peasants. And the Red Death claimed the nobles while they were busy partying.
We certainly can not say that if the NIH budget and CDC budgets were bigger we would have a vaccine and better training of nurses and Personal Protective Clothing at all private state regulated hospitals but we can say without NIH funding and CDC funding we won’t have a vaccine and we won’t have PP clothing and proper training. Maybe investing in our best and brightest is better than giving tax cuts to bankers and athletes.
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“…we respect that opinion and we understand that there’s some rationale for that…”
Now get out of the way. Stop sequestration, stop budget cuts, stop government shutdowns, stop destroying our credit rating, stop defaulting, stop feeing, stop damaging the economy, for god’s sakes stop giving taxpayer’s money to rich people, and everything will be fine. Do your jobs and we’ll do ours.
I think that’s the jist.
When are they going to start demanding that all flights to and from Dallas be banned??
And by “they” I mean all those halfbrains who know practically nothing about the situation, demand perfect 20/20 foresight from non-funded government agencies, and then grill the people who do know (and know, that there things they do not and cannot know), and ignore that information anyway.
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