Newsletter: SiTREP: October 17th, 2014

Statement

Dear Friends,

Just a quick update on where things stand with the Ebola outbreak --

Yesterday, after a week of pondering whether to have a single person coordinating the government's response to the outbreak, President Obama appointed Vice President Biden's former chief of staff to be in charge. I don't know much about him other than that he also served as former Vice President Gore's chief of staff. And he's described in the press as a well-respected "Democrat operative" with no medical or healthcare background. I certainly don't envy the President's situation here, but dithering for weeks over a question of having a single person running the show and then settling on this gentleman doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Also on the Ebola front -- the House Energy and Commerce Committee convened in Washington this week to meet with the Director of the CDC. Members on both sides of the aisle had some tough, but obviously fair, questions for him.

The CDC has been speaking confidently for weeks that we would "stop Ebola in its tracks". As I said previously, I have a lot of faith in our doctors and nurses in this country. But that's only helpful when the basic common-sense stuff is taken care of. If a guy comes into the E.R. with a high fever saying he's just arrived from Liberia, you don't send him home. You don't let the ambulance he rode in continue servicing other patients.

And then… (after one nurse who treated that patient has already been diagnosed with Ebola) you don't tell the second nurse with a fever that she's ok to fly. I don't care if its a 99.5 degree fever and not the 100.4 degree fever that your regulations tell you is required for additional screening. That's insanity. And it's putting people's lives at risk.

As a former law enforcement official and not an epidemiologist, I am always going to be inclined to trust the professionals. I wouldn't appreciate a healthcare official questioning law enforcement decisions we made in real-time. But it reaches a point when you just have to ask… Like if we had a bank robbery in progress and the guy with the mask comes out and asks if it's ok to head over to the bank across the street. A reasonable law enforcement response to that would absolutely not include: "According to our regulations, the mask you're wearing does not meet the definition threshold required for us to be concerned about it. So go head. Just please make sure you look both ways before you cross the street."

It's crazy. But that's the kind of response we've seen so far out of the CDC.

Also in the news, we've got several thousand troops already on the ground in Africa and the President just issued an executive order paving the way for National Guard troops to be called up. According to reports, our men and women on the ground have been working to create some basic infrastructure to treat healthcare professionals over there who have been getting infected. The situation on the ground is dire. There is no doubt about it. Electricity is intermittent at best. Basic plumbing doesn't work. There are precious few supplies and nowhere near enough doctors. And that was before the crisis began. Right now, there are roughly 5,000 dead due to Ebola. The World Health Organization (WHO), which has had people on the ground since the beginning is predicting that without international help, they'll be looking at 10,000 new cases each week by the end of the year. Diseases like this grow exponentially. So when it's a small outbreak, every day counts in trying to contain it. Once it reaches a certain point, it just explodes. And in my opinion, that kind of growth represents a threat -- not just to our national security, but to the entire globe.

What I'm concerned about immediately though, is that if we've got nurses in the United States with everything working in their favor still getting infected on the job, what kinds of precautions are being taken for our personnel on the ground in these countries? What kind of support are we getting from our European allies? And what do we expect to accomplish and by when? The word is that our troops have been on the ground for a month already and not even one of the seventeen planned facilities is complete. Needless to say, having had a son deployed to Africa just a few months ago during the outbreak (safely back home now), I am watching the situation very closely.

Last but not least, we have the debate over the travel ban. Officials from all over the political spectrum, includingyour writer, have called for a ban on travel from those countries to the United States. If a U.S. citizen needs to get home, that's a different story, but as for anybody else… we just can't take that risk when our system isn't functioning nearly as well as it should be.

Opponents of the ban (including the CDC Director) say they are concerned that it could make the situation worse by preventing supplies and medical personnel into the affected countries. And they also say there is no way to track the origin of people who don't buy a single flight to the U.S. or travel to another country before flying to the U.S. Let me just say that if our Customs officials in the U.S. can't figure out how to check travel visa stamps in a pinch, we've got bigger problems than Ebola. And I'll also need a little more explanation on why preventing people from entering the United States is going to impede food aid making it into Liberia.

In any case, the administration has a lot of explaining to do -- both on what's happened so far and more importantly, what we're doing in the weeks and months ahead. For right now, it's an unmitigated mess and the American people are continuing to lose faith.

Sincerely,
Rich Nugent
Member of Congress

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