Tag Archives: Ebola

News

White House spokesman on Ebola czar: “what we were looking for was not an Ebola expert”

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Story from CNS News.

Excerpt:

Pres. Obama wasn’t looking for an Ebola expert when he picked Ron Klain to be the new Ebola Czar, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained Friday.

“What does Ron Klain know about Ebola?” a reporter asked Earnest at a press conference.

“The president wanted somebody who could serve in a coordinating function, to manage our implementation of our whole of government approach to this Ebola situation.”

“To more directly address your question, what we were looking for was not an Ebola expert, but rather an implementation expert, and that’s exactly what Ron Klain is.”

Earnest when on to praise Klain’s involvement in the 2009 Stimulus, which he said “exceeded expectations.”

So there main concern was to pick a politician in order to manage the politics.

CNS News again:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) today denounced today Pres. Obama’s selection of Ron Klain to be his Ebola “czar” as well as on the President’s latest executive actions on immigration – warning that Klain will only make the Ebola crisis worse.

Sessions says that Klain is nothing more than a partisan “political spin” expert with no health care expertise:

“Ebola is a health crisis. Yet the President has appointed as his new Ebola ‘czar’ a partisan loyalist whose expertise is politics-not health. One would think, faced with the prospect of an epidemic, the President would task an expert in epidemiology not an expert in political spin. Sound bites are not going to deter a single infection or save a single life.

“The American people can have zero confidence in Ron Klain’s competence to carry out this critical role.”

Sessions says this isn’t the first time Obama has appointed unqualified, partisan department heads, citing the appointments of HHS Sec. Sylvia Burwell and DHS Sec. Jeh Johnson:

“The President’s Director of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Burwell, was promoted after refusing to answer even those most basic financial questions from Congress during her dismal tenure at the Office of Management and Budget. Burwell, a former campaign operative, was tasked with overseeing the nation’s healthcare system despite no consequential health care experience.

“Secretary Jeh Johnson was chosen to head the one of the largest and most important departments of government despite being a political lawyer with no relevant background. Johnson has devoted his short tenure not to strengthening enforcement but dismantling it.

“Just today-as American citizens face a jobs crisis, debt crisis, border crisis, security crisis, and now a health crisis-Secretary Johnson announced actions not to restore gutted enforcement, but further steps to open our borders.

“DHS is now extending what amounts to a perpetual amnesty to thousands of immigrants from Honduras and Nicaragua, while expediting immigration from Haiti at a time when we can’t keep track of the millions we are already admitting.”

Still no word on blocking flights from countries where Ebola is out of control, because this is the amnesty administration. We don’t want to appear intolerant by telling people “NO”, do we?

There was an excellent podcast from The Weekly Standard on the pick featuring Stephen Hayes. Worth a listen.

News

Second nurse with Ebola called CDC about her fever, was allowed to fly

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From CBS News.

Excerpt:

In the case of Amber Vinson, the Dallas nurse who flew commercially as she was becoming ill with Ebola, one health official said “somebody dropped the ball.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Vinson called the agency several times before flying, saying that she had a fever with a temperature of 99.5 degrees. But because her fever wasn’t 100.4 degrees or higher, she didn’t officially fall into the group of “high risk” and was allowed to fly.

Officials in the U.S. have been trying to calm fears over the Ebola crisis, but time and again events have overtaken their assurances.

In August, before the first U.S. infection, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said: “We’re confident that we have the facilities here to isolate patients, not only at the highly advanced ones like the one at Emory, but really at virtually every major hospital in the U.S.”

[…]And there was reassurance from the White House.

“Every hospital in this county has the capability to isolate a patient, take the measures, put them in place to ensure that any suspected case is immediately isolated and the follow-up steps that have been mentioned are immediately taken,” Lisa Monaco, a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to President Obama, said Oct. 3.

But health care workers weren’t so sure.

“We want to make sure that we have the correct equipment – the protective equipment – to protect both our patients and ourselves,” Katy Roemer, who has worked as a nurse in California for 20 years, told CBS News correspondent John Blackstone last week.

Blackstone asked her whether hazmat suits were available to her.

“Not that I know of,” Roemer said.

Duncan died Oct. 8. Four days later, nurse Nina Pham got sick. Federal officials were now discovering what health workers had warned about.

[…]The director of the CDC, who in August said he was “confident,” said this Tuesday:

“We could’ve sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from day one,” Frieden said. “… I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient – the first patient – was diagnosed. That might have prevented this infection.”

We have nothing to worry about, big government is in control. Don’t you doubt their ability to handle this. You can keep your doctor. You can keep your health plan. Health care premiums will go down. Nobody in the US will ever be infected with Ebola. Now that Ebola is here, it will not spread to anyone else. And if big government fails to protect you, the solution is for them to take more of your money.

Why should we believe that the same big government leftists who covered up Fast and Furious, who blamed Benghazi on a Youtube video, who lied to us about what pulling out of Iraq would cause, who covered up the IRS targeting of conservatives,  who performed clandestine surveillance of journalists, the Bergdahl terrorist-leaders-for-one-traitor swap, ETC., can be counted on to take ANY threat seriously? This is not the private sector we are dealing with – this is the government. The people who lead it win popularity contests. They couldn’t solve their way out of a wet paper bag. Whenever anything goes wrong, they cover it up – and ask for more money, so it “won’t happen again”.

News

Are “budget cuts” to blame for the CDC’s inept handling of Ebola?

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Investors Business Daily tells the truth.

Excerpt:

There haven’t been any real cuts to those budgets at all. At least not in the sense that any American household would recognize.

The CDC’s budget today is 25% bigger than it was in 2008 and 188% bigger than in 2000. The NIH budget has been flat for the past few years, but at a level that’s more than double what it was 14 years ago.

Plus, spending at both of these agencies has actually been higher than President Obama himself proposed (see chart). The 2014 NIH budget, in fact, is almost $1 billion bigger than Obama sought in his budget plan, released in early 2010.

True, the heads of these agencies are decrying cuts. But that’s what government officials always do, even as their budgets continue to grow. Besides, the CDC and NIH are desperate to point the finger of blame somewhere other than their own incompetence.

Even if there has been some cutting here and there at these agencies, it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of fat to trim.

If the NIH was really so concerned about developing an Ebola vaccine, for example, it could have directed more grant money to that effort, rather than wasting it researching such things as diseases among male sex workers in Peru ($400,000), why chimps throw feces ($600,000) and sexual attraction among fruit flies (nearly $1 million).

The CDC isn’t much better at husbanding its resources. A few years ago, it dumped $106 million into a swanky visitors’ center in Atlanta, even though it already had one. It bought $10 million worth of furniture for its lavish new headquarters and spent $1.7 million to advise Hollywood on medical plots.

Yes, the federal government has blown it on Ebola. But that’s not because the relevant agencies have too little money to spend. It’s the result of unfocused missions, bureaucratic bloat and a shameful lack of accountability.

I think that this Ebola crisis is an excellent reminder to us why we should not trust government to be accountable to people. We were told that the government was going to handle this, and there was nothing to worry about. But now we know that there has been mistake after mistake. We were told that Ebola could not spread, but now two nurses have it. It’s another case of the government saying one thing, but the opposite is actually true. If we’re going to have government, we should at least have competent government, and that certainly is not a Democrat government.