‘The Science’ vs. Ebola

Posted By on October 30th, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-science-vs-ebola-1414622296

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.

One member of this subset is apparently Kaci Hickox, the nurse detained in New Jersey but then allowed to travel to her Maine hometown, where she promptly declared that she won’t obey the CDC or Maine guidelines.

Ms. Hickox is right that quarantines infringe on individual liberty, but they represent inherent police powers that the Constitution vests in states. Perhaps the Governors are too severe, but they’re acting in good faith to protect public health amid federal disarray. CDC chief Tom Frieden sounded like a federalist when he conceded that if states “wish to be more stringent than what CDC recommends, that’s within their authority and the system of government that we have. We believe these are based on science.”

In this imaginary battle between reason and ignorance, real scientists don’t pretend that their understanding about an event as complex as the worst Ebola outbreak in history is infallible. The CDC is revising its own protocols on a near-weekly basis.

The truth is that our understanding of Ebola continues to evolve, as in any scientific endeavor. Ebola has an unstable RNA genome, which tends to make genetic errors as each Ebola strand copies itself and multiplies throughout the cells of body tissue and then into new hosts. These mutations mean that the disease itself is changing over time, potentially becoming more (or less) infectious and harder to diagnose.

Quarantines are a matter of policy more than science—that is, balancing the costs of overreacting to a genuine risk against the benefits of reasonable precautions. The liberals who are ostentatiously portraying these trade-offs as akin to the suspension of habeas corpus are damaging science and especially public safety.

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