It reminds me of conservative climate change bashing. An element of pig-headedness because the ‘other side’ has embraced it.
I’ve seen liberals scoff by saying “It spreads through bodily fluids, not the air so stop worrying.”
Oh, like…‘sweat’? Sure, how could my kid possibly catch that at a school? Or ‘vomit’. So if my kid throws up, am I just going to leave it on the floor?
My point is, I think there’s a non-zero chance of this becoming a serious problem and I don’t see the point in bashing it.
For one, I think one of the differences between “liberals” and the type of right-wing sorts who are frothing at the mouth over ebola in the US right now, is that liberals don’t walk around afraid all the time. Sorry, but much of the right wing blog and news seems to be a reaction to something coming to get all us good Merkins AGGGGHHHH!
Anyway, from a medical perspective, I think we haven’t seen enough to know if it’s going to be a large problem in the US. We chit-chat about this at my office – there are doctors and pubic health geeks in my area, so people aren’t exactly just talking out of their asses.
The US has much going for it that other places don’t, including a public health system that has responses in place for outbreaks of contagious conditions. One can only hope that they are deployed when needed.
There is likely more that we could do, and should do. But I don’t think the country is going to devolve into a real-life *The Stand *situation if we handle cases sensibly.
There’s a non-zero chance of almost everything happening. People are notoriously incompetent when it comes to risk assessment.
Climate change denial is in the face of a gigantic overwhelming body of scientific evidence. Ebola is, still, a very tiny risk to Americans who aren’t visiting Sierra Leone. Ergo: “liberals” (by which I believe you mean, intelligent educated people who can properly assess the validity of information sources), are right in both instances. Even though they aren’t comparable in any way except that both wrong reactions are due to stupidity and ignorance.
I don’t spend a lot of time touching the sweat of strangers through open wounds. Should there be any significant chance my kids have ebola, I’d use precautions when cleaning up vomit (gloves, bleach). Hell, I use gloves and bleach when cleaning up their vomit now - it isn’t like I want to touch that.
I have two teenagers who have their driver’s permits, that seems like a more urgent place for me to spend my worry tokens right now.
I think there is a non zero chance of it becoming a serious problem - and I’ve though so since reading Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague 30 years ago. However, I don’t think the alert level in the U.S. has moved to defcon 11. Moreover, I’m not exactly sure why its a huge problem for anyone now - when we’ve been cutting funding that might have helped create a health care infrastructure in Africa that could have contained this over the past 30 years. It isn’t like we haven’t known about the possibility.
I suspect global warming will be similar - when we start getting flooded out of low lying cities (which is already happening on a small scale) suddenly conservatives will go nuts that its impacting business and the economy. Liberals will say “well, I guess you’ll have to move.”)
I’m a liberal and I’m also worried about Ebola. You will never see me calling anyone an idiot for not believing that Ebola isn’t spread through air, because the skeptic in me knows that science is subject to change. We have tons of evidence that it doesn’t spread through air, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible and that it could never happen. Or that it’s not already happening. So I choose to take a “wait and see” approach before preaching anything from a soap box.
When the Dallas dude first got attention and the press was saying that everything was under control, I sucked my teeth and predicted that the other shoe hadn’t dropped yet. And I was right. The hospital and airport fuck-ups came to light the next day.
So no, I’m not an ole okey-doke who always trusts what she’s told by the media and by government officials. However, I do refuse to get worked up into a frenzy over something that’s just a low-level threat to me right now. I am surrounded by millions of more immediate dangers. I’m paying attention to the Ebola developments and semi-seriously running through emergency scenarios in case my city gets hit. But that’s about it. What else could I really do that wouldn’t be completely batshit crazy?
Frankly, I’m more concerned about Enterovirus 68. That is spreading and there have been actual deaths reported here in the States. Hopefully it seems it’s winding down, but it seems a more credible threat than Ebola, at this point.
You know, it never even crossed my mind to think of this as a liberal vs conservative issue. I thought of it as “Ebola is serious, but let’s calm the shit down” vs “Literally everybody is going to die!!!” issue.
The Daily Show did a segment the other day (called “A Million Ways to Die in the U.S.” They showed some clips of news networks (Fox News especially, but not exclusively) talking about the danger of Ebola and how the government needs to do “whatever it takes” to protect American lives.
And then The Daily Show mentioned that 600,000 people already die annually in the U.S. from heart disease. But then they showed clips of Fox News critizing the government for advocating for better diets (less meat, John Stossel saying, “The government shouldn’t be telling us what to eat,” references to the “food police”). The Daily Show aso mentioned that expansion of Medicare would save thousands of lives, and they mentioned that thousands of people to die due to guns. Or that addressing climate change would save lives.
So it’s a matter of realistically addressing dangers and risks. And for people in the U.S., there is a very low risk of death due to Ebola.
You know, I must have missed a memo or something, because I for one have absolutely no idea why everyone is practically wetting themselves in fear that Ebola will suddenly become airborne. As far as I know, no infectious disease known to man has ever just up and “become airborne”, and I don’t think evolution works that way.
Am I right, or is their some disease that didn’t used to be airborne within human history and now is?
And perspective is what is needed when hysterics are shouting that we need to prohibit all flights from Africa and nonsense like that.
Racist and xenophobic nonsense.
The point of Jon Stewart’s piece is that you would save a lot more lives with universal healthcare, stricter driving and gun laws, nutrition programs for the poor, diet instruction for schoolchildren, etc.
Not just more lives—a LOT more. Instead we spend trillions on wars that make us less safe, on security measures that do nothing, and arming cops with military equipment.
And idiots, fools, demagogues, and scoundrels are screaming to halt all flights from Africa.
I haven’t personally noticed any “liberal ‘pooh-poohing’ of the Ebola danger,” but if it did exist, it wouldn’t surprise me. Fear of Ebola would translate to fear of foreigners (especially BLACK foreigners), and that would make a liberal’s head explode. It would also necessitate that liberals join the rational call for closing our borders to illegal immigrants, and that would make their heads explode even worse.
You say ‘potato’; I say ‘potahto.’