Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Dr. Frieden And Mr. Hyde

 

Amanda Vinson shouldn't have flown on an airplane.
But passengers on that airplane are at no risk.

You can't get Ebola on a bus.
But people with Ebola shouldn't ride on one.

Cutting off all flights to W. Africa is a bad idea.
But we're now recommending that all non-essential travel there be cancelled.

Any hospital can treat Ebola patients.
But maybe special Ebola hospitals are a better idea.

We know how to handle Ebola.
We just can't seem to figure it out when it's for real.

Our protocols will stop the disease.
But maybe we need to take another look at our protocols.

All of the above are but a tiny sample of flip-flopping, double-talking snakeoil which bullshit artist Tom Frieden has been selling. As CDC Director, and the Obama Administration's chief Flying Monkey on Ebola, his main function seems to be swooping in, spreading BS all over everything, and then flying away.

You have to wonder how one person can know so much about this disease, so authoritatively, and then have it all unravel, gloriously aflame, usually within days, or even hours.

And typically, it takes entire teams of people to get so much wrong, so fast, and with such flawless consistency.
Tom Frieden on Ebola is a one-man Chicago Cubs roster, from 1909-present.

So now, the latest tear-jerking outrage is that since all of the 76 health workers at THP-Dallas working on Duncan were extremely low-risk patients, they merely self-monitored, and were under no isolation restrictions, let alone a voluntary quarantine.

Which led to latest confirmed patient, Amanda Vinson, a 28-year-old ICU nurse at THP, being free to get on planes to and from Cleveland, to finalize plans for her upcoming wedding.

So at this point, Tom Frieden needs to stand face-to-face with Vinson's fiancé, and explain to him how "highly unlikely" it is that Ebola will ever come to the US, and how "any hospital can treat Ebola patients", "because we know how to handle Ebola". And the meeting needs to be televised live, while Frieden then has to stand their and take the personal response from that young man, ideally including him beating Frieden to death with his bare hands on live TV and in front of millions of witnesses.

Nothing less is an appropriate punishment for someone who has so recklessly endangered the health and safety of every American citizen with his slavish acceptance of jackassical policies, his deliberate and considered adherence to policies rooted in grievous incompetence, and his own inability to think his way out of a wet paper bag on Ebola, or formulate a single idea or policy that hasn't had top be re-evaluated when the obvious and foreseeable consequences land on this repetitive stupidity with both feet.

His mere resignation wouldn't begin to atone for those sins, unless his farewell speech included a ride in a tumbrel cart, and a final stop at a working guillotine.

If this were a fairytale, someone would drop a house on him, or fetch a woodsman to chop him open with an axe. If this were a western, he'd have been thrown under a stampede of cattle long since. But it's Washington D.C., and evidently he hasn't killed enough people yet to have become permanently politically unviable.

It's bad enough the America has sailed into the iceberg Ebola by proceeding at full steam into a fog of incompetence so thick that it would blind a flock of eagles. But compounding that, at every step of this crisis, Frieden has been found scurrying along the deck, and drilling holes in the bottoms of the lifeboats.

8 comments:

  1. You write fantastic thrillers. Too bad you aren't having to make any of this stuff up. Thank you for your clear, no bs voice of truth.

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  2. They even said she could fly, now they say she shouldn't have.

    It's worse than Keystone Cops.

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  3. Thank you. As an APRN in high plains area I agree that i see no facilities ready. Personnel is policy. For example see John Holdren, science czar and his previous work. How about Ebola and the Cloward-Piven strategy. Obamacre hasn't worked yet but this may.

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  4. There is an Italian saying that says, "the mother of an imbecile is always pregnant"... How this one rose to the position as Director of CDC is almost incomprehensible. In another 3 weeks it will be impossible to quarantine the total exposed population within the state of TX, let alone the U.S... How these rank amateurs (from the top down) have parlayed their ad-hoc protocols into a full-blown cluster foxtrot forces one to consider either homicidal intentions, or just plain abject stupidity. In this case, I'll have relatively more comfort believing these people, from the white house down, are stupid and inept to the extreme. Let's hope there's still time for some adult leadership...

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  5. Fantastic - I have never seen such incompetency. Usually health professionals want to err on the side of caution, but this guy has been erring on the side of "sharing" - there are already an awful lot more people who should be under strict quarantine. And they really do need to treat these patients at special centers or end up closing contaminated hospitals. "Any hospital can treat Ebola patients" - famous last words....

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  6. We won't stop persons from at risk countries from flying in, but we will stop American nurses who followed the CDC "protocol" (cough, wink) from flying....its the Hippocratic oath, not hypocritic oath.

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  7. "evidently he hasn't killed enough people yet to have become permanently politically unviable."

    That's a great line. But to name one example Janet Reno killed lots of people (at Waco), and "took responsibility," and continued merrily on.

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  8. Frieden, Rope, tree some assembly required.
    ASAP before he fucks something else up.

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