The Obama administration,
a nurse who refuses to be quarantined, and a sickened doctor
who allegedly lied about his own self-quarantine "seem deeply uninterested" in the concerns ordinary Americans have about the Ebola virus, former Reagan speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan says.
In
a scathing column for The Wall Street Journal, Noonan writes a quarantine for those returning to the United States from Ebola-stricken nations is no different than what many early immigrants endured – including her own great-aunt – who "acknowledged the utility of a quarantine or ban...."
She argues the controversy over Ebola quarantines and travel bans illustrate "another expression of the deep, tearing distance between America’s professional and political elites, who operate as if they are estranged from common sense, and normal people, who are becoming more estranged from the elites, their oblivious and politicized masters."
"The elites," she writes, "are no longer immediately respected, their guidance is not reflexively taken. They seem more immersed in political thinking—what is the ideologically enlightened position to take, where’s the boss on it?—than in protecting public health. Or thinking commonsensically, like your great-aunt."
Noonan notes Doctors Without Borders suggests those returning from health-care work in West Africa not go to work for 21 days, and the military has decided to
quarantine troops back from West Africa for 21 days.
"Why can’t we have an overall national policy that establishes this?" she asks. "Why are the states forced to do it—then pressured not to?"
Noon takes sharpest aim at Maine nurse Kaci Hickox, who refused to be quarantined and threatened to sue after returning from working with Ebola victims in Africa, and Doctors Without Borders volunteer Dr. Craig Spencer, who after his return from treating sick patients traveled freely in New York City before falling ill himself.
"It would have been gracious if the nurse, hearing of heightened public anxiety, and concerned for the safety of others, had patiently accepted the [quarantine] situation and expressed understanding," Noonan writes. "Instead she, and the sick doctor, acted as if, when a microbe meets a respected and altruistic health-care professional, it, like the general public, is expected to bow."
The Obama administration has been equally tone-deaf to Americans' concerns, she charges.
"Support among the American public for quarantine appears at this point to be overwhelming," she adds. "But America’s 'professionals' in the scientific and medical communities, and certainly those in the White House, seem deeply uninterested in the views of common people. When pressed on the issue they, especially the president, offer only gobbledygook and slogans."
Noonan warns that attitude will come back to haunt the administration at polling booths Tuesday.
"It is hard to believe you can patronize people, and play them, and they will not, first chance they get, sharply rebuke you," she writes.
Noonan asserts the only sensible argument against a quarantine "is that the decision might dissuade U.S. health workers from going to West Africa," and that"can easily be answered."
"Pass a law to pay everyone’s full salary while they’re quarantined. Make it a free vacation," she writes. "Get them every kind of benefit and service possible for those three weeks. And then when they’re well, thank them publicly....
Three weeks off and the thanks of a grateful nation. That’s not a disincentive, it’s an incentive."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.