OPINION:
Public health officials should have anticipated that someone like Thomas Eric Duncan would travel by plane after knowingly having been exposed to Ebola. It only stands to reason that sick, scared, desperate people will do anything to survive.
Yet the White House and CDC assure us that the risk of an Ebola outbreak is “extremely low,” and that they can protect the “broader public” and stop it from “spreading widely”—all of which have come under scrutiny this week; they have done little to quell fear and doubt, and more to sow the seeds of panic.
Adding to the hysteria, Josh Earnest and CDC Director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, insist that travel restrictions from Ebola-infected countries will not be forthcoming. Frieden claims that such isolation would “[increase] our own risk because … by stopping it there and by helping them stop it there, we’re helping ourselves.”
AEI’s Dr. Scott Gottlieb concurs that travel bans would do more harm than good by destabilizing the region and discouraging aid; further, he says, porous borders and agricultural migration would render such restrictions ineffective. He advocates for better tracking and testing at airports, better tracing with follow-up phone calls, and accelerating the production of vaccines and therapeutics.
No one doubts that a vaccine is the ultimate weapon, or that travel bans could have a destabilizing effect in the region and cannot prevent all infected persons from traveling, but why the “zero-sum game” thinking?
Cooler heads would advocate for a multi-tiered effort in which prevention, treatment, containment, and eradication are addressed simultaneously. It’s similar to several layers of security with a pool—alarm chimes on doors, a fence around the pool, a cover, and an alarm in the water. They don’t eliminate the potential for human error or a cagey toddler getting around the system, but they do afford parents a good night’s sleep knowing the probability of tragedy is minimized.
As long as human beings are involved, the potential for cracks in the armor are legion: children occasionally access pools through unopened gates; Omar Rodriquez made it into the White House; the passengers were assured the Titanic was unsinkable; and Native Americans were wiped out by smallpox.
We have already witnessed the havoc human error can wreak when Thomas Eric Duncan withheld information about his exposure to Ebola (human error #1) and was released by a Dallas hospital after disclosing that he had recently been in Liberia (human error #2).
Why would we encourage the potential for mishaps on a larger scale? Dare we imagine the hell unleashed if dozens of potentially-infected people were exposed to hundreds on planes, thousands in airports, and millions in the homeland?
And as more individuals have to be “tracked, traced, tested and isolated,” this will invariably lead to an increase in incidences of human error. One can easily envision the cascading effect this will have and the potential to overwhelm our public health system, especially in heavily-populated, urban areas.
We can still fly into and out of West Africa for humanitarian purposes, while preventing infected people from spreading the virus to unexposed regions through inadvisable travel. If we quarantine these hot zones, wouldn’t that be more manageable and less costly than screening, evaluating and following-up on thousands of travelers a day, passing information back and forth to all participating airlines and customs agencies, and then, for those who get through, the huge expense of tracing, tracking, isolating, and treating?
One’s “right to return” is not unfettered, certainly not if he has a bomb in his undies or a virulent WMD in his bloodstream.
Even the screening process is flawed: aside from honesty issues, a few Tylenol can mask a fever, and intestinal maladies might not be readily apparent. Some will legitimately pass all clearances and truthfully respond to questionnaires—but public fears are not easily mollified just because a traveler is not contagious to fellow passengers during his flight, only to become fully symptomatic and a dire threat to his community upon landing.
Our president’s first responsibility is to the health and safety of the public. That includes limiting the exposure of people in America to a ravaging, unpredictable strain of Ebola which, in its elegant simplicity, will do what’s necessary to survive, even if that means dancing on the heads of a population that has never been exposed to it and has no natural immunities.
It is cold comfort to be told that our health system is robust and prepared when it was an epic fail in contending with the very first Ebola case to reach our shores and didn’t anticipate the obvious.
Travel bans might not be “global world order” sexy to some, but it is common sense practical to most and offers a prudent course of action that will stem the tide of exposure. While we cannot anticipate every contingency, we can control the volume of traffic. It only stands to reason that a few hundred cases of Ebola are easier to “track, trace and isolate” than a few thousand.
Sally Zelikovsky is a former attorney who founded the San Francisco Tea Party and the Bay Area Patriots in 2009 and has been active in Republican and conservative politics in California until moving to New Jersey in 2014.
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