Bro-tocol, Or How To Blather Disinterestedly About Ebola And Still Sound Important

It's really disturbing how Dr. Tom Frieden keeps throwing out the "fact" that there "Clearly there was a breach of protocol" without stating any evidence for that proposition or even making it sound like there is anything beyond conjecture backing up that statement.  What breach of protocol occurred?  That part of the explanation is completely absent.  This appears to be just another example of a powerful white dude mansplaining how reality (and particularly that corner of reality that he is in charge of) works, for the benefit of those of us who are just too feeble-minded and submissive to not understand the travails that the rich and powerful must endure in plundering managing us.

Then he comes out and says that we have to re-examine our approach to infection control.  You would think that along with this, he might toss out three or four ideas that smart people have come up with about WHAT WE SHOULD DO to change our approach to infection control.  Just to let us know that he is not just sniffing octane booster and getting blown by farm animals, and to give us some assurance that "doing his job" involves something actually related to the matters he is responsible for, not just tickling the balls of the rich and powerful.  No, this just looks like a case of a scared bureaucrat trying to save his ass by coming up with some official, avuncular-sounding bullshit that is designed to reassure us that Daddy and company are in charge.  And the fire is stoked by the media's gasoline in portraying this institutional succubus as a steady hand on the tiller.

It really looks like the CDC is messing this whole thing up from the get-go.  Don't get me wrong, they have a tough job that gets even tougher as stuff like this gets thrown into the blender.  But there is a big difference between competence (or even one's best attempt at competence) and blatantly covering one's posterior.  The basic dysfunction that is going to play into this whole health care mess in the US is the fact that patients without insurance (read: blood money to big corporate interests who demand it as tribute for us daring to want health care) are often just shunted away, and that is going to make this all much worse.  That is the basic structural problem in the system, and who is going to address that?  We can be whipped up about insurgents in Syria (because there are war profits to be made there), but we won't be told of the much more impending emergency that is our own health insurance system with a structural deficiency that will spread this problem.

Texas Presbyterian Hospital hasn't really added much confidence to this situation.  There is really no adequate explanation why Thomas Eric Duncan was initially turned away, but their behavior seems to be aggressively supporting the contention that they did everything right and shouldn't even be questioned.  But the fact is, people are already starting to not want to go to Texas Presbyterian.  If I was being taken to a hospital by ambulance in Dallas, I would possibly consider telling the ambulance driver to take me to a hospital other than Texas Presbyterian.  And the hospital isn't helping itself by suddenly closing its ER with no explanation.

This is your basic case study in power and control.  How to look authoritative.  How to make meaningless, brief, sound-bite statements that get amplified by a media megaphone in the pockets of big money.  How to hide the ball while pretending a pile of dog turds is really the ball.

So they are telling us that there is not much threat from the Ebola epidemic in the US.  Maybe we can believe them, maybe we can't.  The problem is...the information on this issue is mostly in the hands of a power elite.  So far they are showing us that they are more interested in squashing scandals that arise solely from policies of their own making, and protecting their own lucrative positions, than disseminating correct information and finding solutions.