Welp--No good Obviously Comes From This.

I will be on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning at 7.00. Ebola and ISIS will be topics.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2014

I'm not really sure what The Donald's level of expertise is on the topic of Ebola or ISIS, but he reeeeeaaaallly likes criticizing the president, so, I dunno. I guess he will be doing that thing. Since he was the guy who suggested just letting ebola-stricken Americans die, I'm sure whatever he's planning on saying will be most illuminating.

But now that there has been a second person in Dallas diagnosed with this disease, it might not be a bad idea to look rationally at what has happened. For one thing, as I've mentioned before in the comments, the decision by ER staff at Texas Health Presbyterian to let Duncan go with just a prescription for antibiotics when his fever had spiked to 103 F strikes me as shocking. That's a dangerous fever--a person's kidneys could shut down! A person could experience seizures! I'm not sure why they turned him out for sure--but I suspect to some degree they weren't trained to look twice at what should have been a major warning sign that this guy needed immediate isolation and observation. The infection of the health care worker who tended to him appears to be due to a breach of protocol, and it seems like there is some question about whether this particular facility was equipped to handle this kind of case. (I think it bears thinking about that a health care worker became infected--but as yet, not a single one of his family in isolation show signs of the disease.)


It seems to me that valid commentary is more likely to come from people with some medical background, and probably not from partisan nutters. I mean, when someone like Phyllis Schlafly emerges from her crypt to allege that Obama wants people to get ebola to sort of even things out, I wonder what the value is in that. Is it supposed to be seen as clever political commentary that a president wants an outbreak of a killer disease on his watch, as if that's so great for the old legacy? (But she's mighty well-preserved, isn't she? Holding up her bitter end even if she makes no sense? She's like a particularly chewy bit of hate jerky.) When recently convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza tweets: "Which is worse: EBOLA, the disease; or OBOLA, the dream from his father?(with illustration)", one can really only cringe. This is a Dartmouth grad, making a "foreign name so funny" joke only a ten-year old could love.

The CDC has had massively decreased funding since about 2003 (they've been working on an ebola vaccine since 2001) and the country is doing without a surgeon general because President Obama's pick has the radical opinion that taking bullets is bad for people's health. It would really be neat if our media focused on things that help, rather than the opinions of people who really have no apparent interest in being helpful.