Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma

Africa, Like Trayvon Martin, is extremely important to Barack Obama. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said famously about the slain teenager. His fellow-feelings about the continent, the president expressed during the August 4-6 U.S.-Africa Summit, this year: “I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – partners with America,” he said.

With the wealth of the most industrious, generous and gullible taxpayer at his disposal, the president believes that it is his duty, first, to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, when, in fact, the duty of the president of the United States is to those who pay the piper.

America’s governing elites habitually betray their constitutional and fiduciary obligations to their constituents. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, claim that restricting entry into the U.S. from the Ebola ground zero is without merit “from a public health standpoint,” and will only worsen matters. For whom, pray tell, Dr. Fauci? For American nurses? Cui bono Dr. Frieden?

Contrary to the Frieden-Fauci-Obama obfuscations, it is quite possible to both stop at-risk individuals from entering the U.S., as well as assist in curbing the contagion in the hot-spot countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The two are not mutually exclusive. While the U.S. welcomes, on average, 150 daily travelers from West Africa; dozens of infection-free African nations have done the sensible thing to contain the spread of the dread disease. The most advanced of them, South Africa, has “restricted entry for all non-citizens traveling from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

OBAMA’S OBFUSCATIONS ABOUT EBOLA

Back in South Africa of the mid 1990s, I trained and volunteered as an HIV/AIDS counselor. My last client, before I decamped to North America, was a lovely gay man who had just been diagnosed HIV positive and whose CD4-cell count was already low. He wept in my arms for hours.

My point: Comparing HIV/AIDS to Ebola, as the Frieden-Fauci duo has repeatedly done, amounts to politically correct theatre. For one thing, it is not easy to contract the human immunodeficiency virus. For another, the virus is relatively fragile outside the host. Viral load (or titer) factors into the chances of transmission. It is both easy and cheap to prevent infection. HIV infection rates in Africa have little to do with a lack of resources. Rather, they are associated with violent and unprotected sex irrespective of ample outreach and education.

Ebola is the opposite. It is not difficult to get. The virus doesn’t easily destruct outside the body. And it is hard to stop an Ebola epidemic in West Africa because of the magical thinking that pervades the culture and a lack of infrastructure.

Front men for the CDC and offshoots have obfuscated aplenty about Ebola. However, Dr. Barack “Obola,” who should get that growing proboscis checked out, takes the cake. The president has managed to dispense Ebola prescriptions in direct contradiction to even the CDC’s breezy platitudes: “You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus. … Ebola is not spread through the air like the flu. … You cannot get it from another person until they start showing symptoms of the disease, like fever. … You cannot get it from someone who’s asymptomatic.”

In fact, “casual transmission in close quarters, in public spaces is quite possible.” Spending a protracted time within three feet of an infected person is not without risk. Flecks of “viremic” spittle sprayed in your direction from a coughing or animated interlocutor on a bus ride could result in transmission.

CONSPIRACY OR JUST GOVERNMENT SOP?

Be it for Jihad or germs, the government prohibits what I’ve termed rational profiling. As to Jihad, airport personnel screen everybody alike, grandma from Nebraska and Abdullah from Mecca. As to germs, the CDC advises screening for symptoms of the Ebola disease. If a traveler is “asymptomatic,” CDC guidelines, given with government imprimatur, prohibit the detention or quarantine of nationals or residents from the “hot zone” countries.

All this is in the service of the deadly dogma of political correctness.

As a Liberian living in the devastated capital of Monrovia, Patient Zero (Thomas Eric Duncan), who brought Ebola to the U.S., posed a grave risk to Americans—as do all residents and nationals of countries at the epicenter of the outbreak. Writing for the Canadian Center for Research on Globalization, Dr. Jason Kissner hypothesized that the U.S. government refused to isolate Duncan on the basis of his Liberian and Monrovian origins, because it doesn’t want Americans to associate country of origin with an Ebola risk factor, as this could “conceivably completely destroy the One Party State’s immigration reform goals—especially given psychological associations with mystery viruses and other illnesses believed to have arrived from south of the border.”

While I am no conspiracy theorist—never have been—the theory proffered by Kissner seems plausible, if not by design at least by default. Reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence. To that end, justifying their mission—open borders and multiculturalism, always—is necessary at all costs.

GRATITUDE BREEDS CONTEMPT

The index patient aforementioned received exorbitantly expensive, tax-funded care from the dedicated healthcare providers of Dallas’ Presbyterian Hospital, two of whom are fighting for their lives. Nevertheless, the family of the late Mr. Duncan has accused his benefactors of racism. Had he survived, Duncan’s own government, promised the Liberian ambassador to the U.S, intended to sue him for lying to Liberian authorities about his exposure to Ebola on a perfunctory screening questionnaire.

Those of us who hail from Africa proper know how conservative Africans truly are. Most Africans would find American moral relativism repugnant. Ambassador Jeremiah Sulunteh has condemned Duncan’s deception. “Our hearts are broken to witness this reckless behavior on the part of Duncan,” lamented the Liberian diplomat, who had nothing but praise for “a country that has been there for Liberia all the way.”

Let’s see, in the capital Monrovia, American marines are mounting a heroic response to the Ebola outbreak. Stateside, in Maryland, our scientists are developing a vaccine. The Brits will soon land in Sierra Leone with men and medical materiel of their own. Germany, too, is galvanizing its formidable resources. Founded by French physicians, Doctors Without Borders is second to none in alleviating Third World misery.

Yes, Ebola will be defeated by a munificent West. That’s who Africans must thank.

Come to think of it, Obama owes a lot to the same, much-maligned “system.” From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation. Obama didn’t build what he has; he got it by grant of government privilege. But like the family of Thomas Eric Duncan, Barack Obama repeatedly demonstrates that gratitude breeds contempt.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty,
The Quarterly Review,  Praag.org
October 17, 2014