Ebola in a “Global World”

For the past week, it’s been nearly impossible to get through the day without hearing about the Ebola virus. Even uninformed members of the public – you know, the people who are more concerned about what’s going on at Dodger Stadium than the White House – have been inundated with Ebola updates from their own limited sources of news. So now that we know more than we ever wanted to know about this disease and the media has us scared straight, it seems perfectly reasonable for us to ask the question: Why isn’t our government willing to do more to protect us? The daily updates on the conditions of the hospitalized Ebola patients here in America are interesting, I suppose – but do they do anything to help us?

We don’t need to know every time the Liberian Ebola patient in America (who traveled here knowing he had been exposed to the disease) has his condition updated from critical to serious, and then back to critical. God bless him for helping Ebola patients in his country, and I wish him a full recovery – but he knowingly exposed people to the disease, and then lied multiple times about it in order to get into the United States. That’s something that cannot be tolerated by our government.

Incompetency and Redundancy

Our government needs to take action now, and it seems like the only swift, effectual action would be to stop all flights in and out of Ebola-affected areas like Liberia, Sierra Leon and Guinea. But when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked whether the President was considering this, his answer was, “We live in a global world, and what we’re confident that we can do is to both protect the safety of the traveling public and … protect the broader American public by rigorously applying the kind of medical protocols that are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control.” In other words, no – we will not be suspending flights. No, we will not be protecting Americans from being exposed to Ebola because we “live in a global world.” Of course we live in a global world; “global” and “world” mean the same things. So now, we see examples of incompetency and redundancy in the daily White House press briefings. How quaint.

Now That There’s a Real Health Crisis…

Last week, Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes called the media outcry regarding Ebola “scaremongering.” This has become so familiar; whenever a legitimate crisis exists and the government’s response to it is substandard, the first resort of the left is to pronounce any criticism of the government “fear mongering.” But in this case, it isn’t only right-leaning media outlets criticizing the White House response to the Ebola crisis; it’s also respected mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post. It’s been almost five years since our President and his colleagues in the Senate pushed a broken healthcare law on the American people, under the guise that it was the government’s obligation to meet the medical needs of all Americans. Yet now that we have a legitimate public health crisis, that same government refuses to halt travel to and from the locations that are causing it – for the sake of being a “global world?” It’s a flimsy answer, and we deserve better.

Ed Hoffman is the host of the Main Event on AM590 which airs Saturday 9:30AM- 10:30AM and Sunday 4:00PM- 5:00PM.