Ebola Quarantines: Is President Obama Hoping For An Outbreak?

Ebola quarantines are in effect in four states thus far, according to Mediaite, with New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Illinois, leading the charge.

The quarantines have been mandatory for healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, or anyone who has had contact with an Ebola patient — and they’ve already made at least one worker agitated.

A nurse who ended up testing negative for the disease in New Jersey blasted Gov. Chris Christie for what she deemed to be “an appalling response.”

(Sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am, just trying not to impose a 50 percent chance of death on fellow Americans courtesy of a virus we know relatively little about and for which there is no known cure.)

The point of contention for those opposed to Ebola quarantines is that they should not be mandatory, but so-called “self-quarantines,” as recommended by the CDC.

The honor system, in other words — always foolproof.

While Christie is a Republican, you can’t really say this is the GOP trying to score political points against President Obama. After all, Illinois and New York are heavily Democratic states, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had this to say.

“We were operating under the CDC guidelines, which we assumed were appropriate guidelines. I think we’ve learned that we need to go further than the guidelines, that’s our basic point.”

It is extremely easy to criticize President Obama and the White House on trying to pressure these states to rescind their policies for Ebola quarantines, so that’s what I’ll do.

First of all, the Ebola “hysteria” that the President warned against was pretty much a creation of the CDC he oversees allowing an infected patient to fly from Dallas to Cleveland and back on a commercial airline, exposing as many as 800 people to the deadly virus.

It was also his CDC that failed to prepare 85 percent of healthcare workers with proper protocols for handling Ebola patients.

It was also his CDC that spoke out vehemently against the implementation of Ebola travel bans from West Africa into the U.S., and it was this organization that estimates as many as 100 to 150 people arrive in the U.S. per day from the so-called “hot zone,” where the Ebola outbreak is out of control and has killed almost five times the amount of people since the first of the year than it did in the 40 years prior.

Any “healthcare expert” that President Obama trots out to speak against rigid Ebola quarantines in the U.S. at this point can only be seen as a political maneuver meant to stave off panic, which continues to be a drag on his declining approval ratings and his party’s probable loss at the polls in November, by the way.

In other words, the administration has lost complete credibility on this issue, as evidenced by the bipartisan fears of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S.

America should be concerned because if one didn’t know any better, it would seem as though the White House wanted this to spread with its refusal to implement common sense protocols to protect the nation.

I get that we shouldn’t all be heading out to the grocery stores, buying up all the bread, and hiding in bunkers just yet. But does it have to get to that point before the federal government makes a move towards doing just one thing that makes any sense?

What do you think, readers? Has the White House lost its collective mind on this, or are the states’ Ebola quarantines going too far?

[Image via ShutterStock]