Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday said that the calls for travel bans from West Africa don’t make much sense.
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.
But Fauci said that such a ban could just be “counterproductive.”
“[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.”
Fauci said that while he opposes a travel ban, he recognizes that there’s a valid argument in support of it.
“I think one needs to understand that people who say that, we respect that opinion and we understand that there’s some rationale for that,” he said.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.