RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to reboot America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Old allies would become people we occasionally talked to. Old enemies would become new allies. Goodbye Queen, hello Vladimir. Trade the Anglosphere for Latin America’s Marxist dictatorships. Replace allied governments in the Middle East with Islamists and call it a day for the Caliphate.

Very little of that went according to plan.

Obama is still stuck with Europe. The Middle East and Latin American leftists still hate America. The Arab Spring imploded. Japan, South Korea and India have conservative governments.

And then there’s Israel.

The original plan was to sideline Israel by focusing on the Muslim world. Instead of directly hammering Israel, the administration would transform the region around it. The American-Israeli relationship would implode not through conflict, but because the Muslim Brotherhood countries would take its place.

That didn’t work out too well. Instead of gracefully pivoting away, Obama loudly snubbed Netanyahu. A photo of him poking his finger in Netanyahu’s chest captured the atmosphere. Netanyahu delivered a speech that Congress cheered. And Obama came to see him as a domestic political opponent.

The torrent of anti-Israel leaks from the administration is a treatment usually reserved for political opponents. The snide remarks by White House spokesmen and the anonymous personal attacks on Netanyahu in the media echo domestic hate campaigns out of the White House like Operation Rushbo.

Netanyahu wasn’t just the leader of a country that the left hated. He had become an honorary Republican.

A quarantine is good enough for the military but not civilians.

Whatever the damage that the White House, liberals and the press corps say Ebola quarantines will do, their reaction to the state-imposed isolation policies has already done far worse. The federal contradictions and false claims of omniscience are adding to public confusion—and may discredit an important tool that the country will need if there is a major outbreak of Ebola or some other pathogen.
Somehow liberals are trying to convert the Ebola debate into the new trial of Galileo, as if any dissent over the appropriate response is the Inquisition. President Obama emerged on Tuesday to denounce the New York, New Jersey and other state quarantines, which he said “aren’t based on science and best practices.” He instructed lesser politicians to adopt the new Centers for Disease Control monitoring and movement guidelines instead—because they are “based on the science, based on the facts.”

Yet on Tuesday Army General Ray Odierno ordered personnel returning from West Africa to spend 21 days in seclusion, and on Wednesday the Pentagon extended the policy to the rest of the military. This quarantine is being called a “controlled monitoring period,” as if Ebola can tell the difference between the troops and medical workers and travellers.

Yet the White House is attempting to argue exactly that. Press secretary Josh Earnest said, “It would be wrong to suggest that it would make the American people safer to apply this military policy in a civilian context. The science would not back that up.” Does the science of Ebola distinguish between civilians and soldiers, or is he talking about political science?

The argument is that quarantine would dissuade people from volunteering to help, but they’re not being forced to return home by way of Gitmo. The subset of humanitarians must be small who are willing at great personal danger to brave a contagion in Africa but are unwilling to accept the minor sacrifice of three weeks at home for the greater good.

Kaci Hickox, the nurse who was briefly quarantined at a Newark, N.J., hospital after flying into the state en route from Ebola-ravaged Sierra Leone, now says she won’t comply with the three-week home-quarantine requirements in her home state of Maine. “She doesn’t want to agree to continue to be confined to a residence beyond the two days,” her New York-based lawyer, Steven Hyman, tells the Bangor Daily News.The Associated Press quotes Hyman as saying: “She’s a very good person who did very good work and deserves to be honored, not detained, for it.”

At least two other medical professionals have acted as if public-health rules don’t apply to them. The New York Post reports that physician Craig Spencer—like Hickox a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, in his case in Guinea—“lied to authorities about his travels around the city . . ., law-enforcement sources said”:

Spencer at first told officials that he isolated himself in his Harlem apartment—and didn’t admit he rode the subways, dined out and went bowling until cops looked at his MetroCard the sources said.

“He told the authorities that he self-quarantined. Detectives then reviewed his credit-card statement and MetroCard and found that he went over here, over there, up and down and all around,” a source said.

And let’s not forget Nancy Snyderman, a Princeton, N.J., physician who entered voluntary quarantine after a fellow traveler to Liberia was diagnosed with Ebola. On Oct. 9 the Planet Princeton website reported that “Snyderman allegedly was seen sitting in her car outside of the Peasant Grill in Hopewell Boro this afternoon. A reader reported that a man who was with her got out of the car and went inside the restaurant to pick up a take-out order. Another man was in the back seat of her black Mercedes. Snyderman had sunglasses on and had her hair pulled back, the reader said.”

The state issued a mandatory quarantine order, and on Oct. 13 Snyderman “issued an apology to the public . . . but did not indicate that she had violated the voluntary confinement agreement . . . or take personal responsibility for the violation.”

Pretending to be guided by “science” rather than practicing politics in service of their post-American agenda, Obama administration officials persevere in the irresponsible suggestion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air – i.e., that it requires physical contact with an infected person that results in exposure to bodily fluids. It should go without saying that because viruses mutate, responsible scientists would never claim that the “science” about them is “settled.” But quite apart from the dynamic circumstances, government scientists are obviously concerned about air transmission in the here and now, even as the spin-meisters claim it cannot happen.

Aaron Klein has uncovered a “broad agency announcement” (BAA) from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), soliciting research proposals to combat Ebola (in connection with the government’s efforts against chemical and biological threats). The BAA is appended to a “Federal Business Opportunities” notice – the notice can be found here, and the BAA is an attachment atop the right column, accessible through the link “HDTRA1-15-EBOLA-BAA”).

At page 7, Section 2.2.4 (“Ebola Characterization”), the Defense Department’s BAA explains that Ebola is “aerostable” and, since other filoviruses infect through “the respiratory route,” it is at least theoretically possible that Ebola could, too. (The CDC elaborates that Ebola is a filovirus.) As the BAA puts it:

While current science indicates the disease can only be transmitted by contact with contaminated body fluids, it remains unclear if other transmission modes are feasible. Filoviruses are able to infect via the respiratory route and are lethal at very low doses in experimental animal models, however the infectious dose is unknown. There is minimal information on how well filoviruses survive within aerosolized particles, and in certain media like the biofilm of sewage systems.

The BAA goes on to add (my italics): “While current science indicates the disease can only be transmitted by contact with contaminat”Preliminary studies indicate that Ebola is aerostable in an enclosed controlled system in the dark and can survive for long periods in different liquid media and can also be recovered from plastic and glass surfaces at low temperatures for over 3 weeks.”

At page 9, section 2.2.6 (“Topic: CBT-02, Rapid Disinfection Processes), the BAA further explains that the Defense Department is thus looking for treatments that could combat deposits of Ebola transmitted “as an aerosol” as well as by the better known means of bodily fluid contact (again, my italics):

The Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, announced October 28th that his agency has raised the security level for federal buildings in the aftermath of last week’s terror attacks in Canada:

“The reasons for this action are self-evident: the continued public calls by terrorist organizations for attacks on the homeland and elsewhere, including against law enforcement and other government officials, and the acts of violence targeted at government personnel and installations in Canada and elsewhere recently,” Johnson said in a statement. “Given world events, prudence dictates a heightened vigilance in the protection of US government installations and our personnel.”

Aren’t you absolutely bowled over by the cat-like reflexes of the Obama Administration? I mean really, we have only seen the fall of every major town in Iraq, sans Baghdad, the engagement of even Islamist countries in the fight against the Islamic State, beheadings and actual declarations of violent intent from the Islamic State and associated Islamist terror groups. We have seen “faceless selfies” of wanna-be jihadis and jihadist sympathizers featuring signs with pro-Islamic State propaganda in front of buildings in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, DC. And we have seen beheadings on American soil in the name of Islam. Why should we expect any meaningful and/or timely response from an administration that is still trying to figure out if an infectious disease should warrant a quarantine of travelers arriving from infected countries?

Oh sure, the brilliant mind that is Barack Obama doesn’t succumb to the knee-jerk decision, especially where national security and foreign policy are concerned. That’s probably why he is still deliberating the security of the US border in the face of Islamist terrorists who have declared they will bring car bombs and beheadings to US soil; and why he is purposely ignoring the transportation of infectious disease across the border in the form of Enterovirus 68. Titrated to the Obama Administration’s response rate to serious issues facing the American citizenry, he will probably see our border secured after the 27th car bomb goes off in New York (after he chastises politicians there for their kneejerk Islamophobic responses) and after all of the schools in every state on the Southern border are quarantined.

When my nephew was in St. Vincent’s hospital after being run over by a murderous driver, he was in a lot of pain. I went to the nurse’s station to ask if someone could come to check him out and was angrily told by the head-nurse that they were all busy tending to my nephew’s roommate, a gentleman who had AIDS. Her meaning was clear: in the hierarchy of patient needs, AIDS always trumps fractured bones. Two days later, it was the AIDS patient who was released while my nephew was dead from lack of attention to a blood clot that wasn’t caught in time.

I thought of this tragedy because of the attitude of Kaci Hickox, the hothead nurse who wants to sue anyone who dares to quarantine her. Here’s a young woman whose priority is helping destitute and desperate Africans dying of a plague while at the same time displaying total lack of empathy for the epidemiology of preventing that plague from spreading in American cities and large population centers. (According to the World Health Organization, ebola has already spread to eight countries) You get lots of praise for donating your time to Doctors Without Borders; not so much for just complying with quarantine rules. You’re a hero if you travel to Africa to work in the midst of a death ward; you’re just another nurse when you deal with scared middle-class Americans who are already over-privileged. Wild Ms. Hickox is convinced that she knows exactly when she might be contagious and can self-regulate her behavior without any government interference. But there are disagreements over how long the period of contagion lasts or even the mode by which the virus spreads. Some scientists have claimed that the virus in a sneeze droplet can spray far wider than originally thought and can live long enough on surfaces to pose a problem to someone who didn’t get personally sprayed by that sneeze.