$#!^ Tom Frieden Says

                        

Tom Frieden, head of the CDC (and lest we forget, his sidekick Anthony Fauci at NIAID),

have been tireless throughout this crisis.

Tirelessly spinning, tirelessly lying, tirelessly stupid, and tirelessly wrong.

"Ebola is highly unlikely to come to the US"
FAIL
Ebola got here within days of those statements.

"We know how to handle Ebola"
FAIL
We mishandled it every step of the way.

"We have protocols in place"
FAIL
"Protocol" implies some standard; what we had were widely misunderstood guidelines, honored about like the Pirates' Code.

"Any hospital can handle Ebola patients safely"
FAIL
To date NO hospital, outside the four BL4 isolation wards, can handle Ebola safely.

"We're working with local officials and hospitals"
FAIL
Local officials and hospitals hadn't even heard of you nor from you, and you didn't think to even send anyone there until days and weeks after that was flagrantly and painfully obvious.

"Ebola is hard to catch"
FAIL
It's so easy to catch, the merest failure to completely protect from it transmitted it flawlessly to two nurses covered almost head-to-toe. It's only pure good fortune - LUCK - that following your B.S. didn't infect 74 other workers at THP-Dallas as well, just for starters, and luckier still that it appears you haven't managed to kill anyone.

"There was a breach in the protocol"
FAIL
The protocol itself was horribly flawed and years out of date. MSF/DWB knew years ago how to dress people in the Third World to handle this safer, but the CDC followed the "Not invented Here" bias, and needlessly exposed hundreds of health workers and got 2 nurses infected with this deadly disease before they changed their protocol, and disseminated it widely.

"We shouldn't impede air travel here"
FAIL
We've already funneled arrivals down to just five airports, possibly in the nick of time, and even that is too little too late, as they only stop the symptomatic arrivals. They will do nothing to stop asymptomatic carriers of Ebola, just like they failed to stop Thomas Duncan. The minute Duncan v2.0 gets here (when, not if, according to the latest UK medical study) that little lie will be naked in the open all by itself, and the penultimate chicken will have come home to roost.

"We know how Ebola is transmitted"
FAIL
Even our top scientists don't know that, and say so. It's even on the CDC website. If you KNEW how it was transmitted, you'd know why a small area or two of exposed skin allowed two nurses to catch it from just one patient.

But most striking in this, is what you won't hear Frieden (or Fauci) say:

We're sorry. We don't know. WE WERE WRONG.

They have yet to own up to their own mistakes, their own grand pronouncements, their own personal cavalcade of monumental blunders, bluster, and bullshit.

They haven't apologized to the two nurses who got infected following their dreadfully insufficient protocols.
They haven't apologized to the hundreds of other health care workers they exposed, by those same flawed and outdated guidelines.
They haven't apologized to THP-Dallas, for letting them take a bullet that anyone of sense knew NO hospital in this country was prepared for (nor even yet is).
They didn't apologize to the officials in Dallas and Texas, for leaving them holding the bag while CDC pondered things from afar.
They haven't apologized to hundreds to thousands of people in Dallas, Cleveland, and travelers in between, for their exposure to this disease by their own incompetence, hubris, and blatant blind stupidity.
They haven't apologized to the government of the United States, for so egregiously misleading them on our actual knowledge, preparedness, or capabilities to deal with this disease, and for continuing to mislead them about the best courses to deal with it.
And they haven't apologized to 316 million Americans, for so carelessly, thoughtlessly, stupidly, and recklessly allowing this disease to rampage so far and wide, putting so many of their friends and neighbors at fear of or in direct risk of infection, and for so blindly allowing it to ever arrive here in the first place by not only allowing, but demanding, that the door be kept wide open to its arrival, knowing how all of the preceding would inevitably follow.

You won't hear any of this, because that's what men do, and what leaders do:
They take responsibility for their actions, they acknowledge their failures, and they seek to make amends.

They don't dissemble, obfuscate, shuffle their papers, and stare stunned into the headlights of the oncoming train while innocent people are about to die.

And they don't blithely risk the lives of those innocent people, nearly killing them, nor try to blame other people for their own shortcomings, in order to bolster their own delusional conviction of their own wisdom and infallibility.

You have to get that your careers are over, and than any alleged medical credibility you might once have possessed to bring to this or any future health crisis is shot to hell as effectively as a duck hit by a minigun firing a dumptruck full of bullets, right? RIGHT?!
You two, right now, are the co-captains of the LZ Hindenburg.

If actual men and leaders were in those posts, they'd do all those things, resign immediately for having failed so monumentally, and either get on a plane to Monrovia to quietly try and atone for and clean up their mess, or retire to their private studies, set their affairs in order, and have a brief conversation with a gun loaded with a single bullet before doing the right thing.

Walk tall, you festering piles of putrescence.
Hope that the entire nation has the attention span of a fruit fly.
A more just society would see you swinging from a handy lightpole after a hasty curbside judicial proceeding.
And it may yet.