“…health officials stressed that the nation’s most populous city need not fear his wide-ranging travel in the days before his illness began.”
My God. How stupid they must think we are. Okay, fair enough. I suppose in many cases they are probably right about the stupidity. But come on…not all of us are idiots. They have no idea what you’re talking about…not really. So why not just say it? This is like dealing with a 5-year-old who is telling some ludicrous lie that they themselves know is ludicrous, yet they cling to it like a blankie in a blackout. You just want to shake them and yell at them that they are not fooling anybody and just tell the truth, because we both already know what it is.
The tone of the government and “medical experts” has become almost patronizing now as they once again tell us that unless you’re receiving a blood transfer from a Liberian donor while simultaneously sharing needles with and bare-backing a howler monkey in estrus, you absolutely positively cannot get this disease. “The virus is not airborne,” they say, their tone growing in impatient annoyance each time they say it. “You cannot get this disease from casual contact. And we know that you are not contagious until you are symptomatic.”
The New York press conference was absurd. To wit:
- They tell us how “out in front” of the most recent case of Ebola they are, in patent denial of the fact that the whole reason they are having to have a press conference to reassure the electorate they have the situation under control is because they obviously don’t, and the evidence is presently laying in a hospital bed in isolation in downtown Manhattan.
- They rhetorically bludgeon us with the fact that the latest infected American is an actual, honest-to-God medical doctor, and talk about how fortunate it was because this is a medical doctor that contracted the disease, and that he has a reputation for being “very responsible.”
- They show a picture of the doctor in west Africa a couple weeks ago, and there he is, smiling away in his state-of-the-art biohazard suit, taking every precaution possible, and yet now here he is, full of Ebola. And then they emphasize yet again that we who have no protective gear or specialized breathing apparatus whatsoever, have zero chance of contracting Ebola even though we were riding around on the sweaty subway with this guy when he started feeling hot.
- They are thankful that this person was knowledgeable enough to self-isolate. Well thank God for that. Phew. Praise His name! But then two minutes later, in the same press conference, they tell us that he rode two different subway lines, took an Uber cab, and went bowling. At least that’s what he said he did.
- And because it is so impossible for anyone to catch this virus from him, the bowling alley closes down and is chemically scrubbed, the Uber driver is found and quarantined, and his car is given the same treatment as the bowling alley, and the airliner upon which our patient was not symptomatic is pulled from service and given the same chemical exorcism as the bowling alley and the Uber car. “An overabundance of caution,” they say. Yeah. All that shit was overdue to be cleaned anyway.
Ebola is not a “new virus.” The first reported case was in 1976. I first heard about it in 1991, when absolutely no one in Hollywood would be seen in public without a goddamn AIDS awareness ribbon pinned to their chest. One of my biology professors was talking to a few of us who were early to class about a disease in Africa that was so horrific that it make AIDS look like a big, pink, milk-filled titty. A disease that killed you only after about a week of indescribable agony that included your internal organs exploding in slow motion, and bleeding from the eyes and every other mucous membrane, and the only treatment was chain the hospital doors closed and burn the whole fucker down with everybody inside.
Which brings us, I suppose, to the point: something has changed. For 40 years, outbreaks of this disease have been extremely destructive and deadly in Africa, and for that same amout of time, westerners have been traveling to wherever those outbreaks occurred, working with and helping the victims, researching the disease, and managing, somehow, to control it. And it has (obviously) not been eradicated, it has been kept in check and managed. Until now. Something has changed. And now it is not longer being kept in check or managed at all. As of yesterday the estimated number of cases of Ebola in west Africa was over 10,000, making this the largest and deadliest outbreak yet, exponentially. And that is just an estimate: they don’t know anywhere near the exact number. Something has changed. And now, suddenly, this summer, after 40 years, Ebola left Africa and began traveling the world, coming to the United States in two major cities: Dallas and New York. Something has changed, but no one is wondering what. The answers are too frightening.
We know what has not changed: intercontinental air travel has been virtually unchanged in the last 20 years. If it was only regular flights from the United States to Africa that were needed for an outbreak of this magnitude, it would have happened in 1995. Sanitation and living conditions have not gotten significantly worse in the affected parts of Africa: it has always been a war-torn miasmic cesspool of disease, starvation, and completely failed governments and social policies. Something changed with the virus, and if something changed with the virus then the talking heads at this news conference don’t really know what the hell they’re talking about. Which is fine. We’re just human. There are forces in nature that are stronger than us, that can and do kick our ass as a species that we can do nothing about, and that we may never truly understand, be able to predict, or prevent. It’s okay to say “we’re not exactly sure why this responsible and competent doctor who did everything right contracted the disease.” I know, I know…you don’t want to cause a panic. We’re not going to panic. Most Americans know that statistically they are more likely to have been married to Kim Kardashian than they are to die of Ebola. What makes us uncomfortable, and what really primes the panic pump, is when you do not level with us. When you are clearly not shooting us straight. When your intention to placate is so transparent.
Somebody thought they could leave a comment!