Dr. Frieden and Mr. Hyde

 

Amanda Vinson shouldn't have flown on an airplane.
But passengers on that airplane are at no risk.

You can't get Ebola on a bus.
But people with Ebola shouldn't ride on one.

Cutting off all flights to W. Africa is a bad idea.
But we're now recommending that all non-essential travel there be cancelled.

Any hospital can treat Ebola patients.
But maybe special Ebola hospitals are a better idea.

We know how to handle Ebola.
We just can't seem to figure it out when it's for real.

Our protocols will stop the disease.
But maybe we need to take another look at our protocols.

All of the above are but a tiny sample of flip-flopping, double-talking snakeoil which bullshit artist Tom Frieden has been selling. As CDC Director, and the Obama Administration's chief Flying Monkey on Ebola, his main function seems to be swooping in, spreading BS all over everything, and then flying away.

You have to wonder how one person can know so much about this disease, so authoritatively, and then have it all unravel, gloriously aflame, usually within days, or even hours.

And typically, it takes entire teams of people to get so much wrong, so fast, and with such flawless consistency.
Tom Frieden on Ebola is a one-man Chicago Cubs roster, from 1909-present.

So now, the latest tear-jerking outrage is that since all of the 76 health workers at THP-Dallas working on Duncan were extremely low-risk patients, they merely self-monitored, and were under no isolation restrictions, let alone a voluntary quarantine.

Which led to latest confirmed patient, Amanda Vinson, a 28-year-old ICU nurse at THP, being free to get on planes to and from Cleveland, to finalize plans for her upcoming wedding.

So at this point, Tom Frieden needs to stand face-to-face with Vinson's fiancé, and explain to him how "highly unlikely" it is that Ebola will ever come to the US, and how "any hospital can treat Ebola patients", "because we know how to handle Ebola". And the meeting needs to be televised live, while Frieden then has to stand their and take the personal response from that young man, ideally including him beating Frieden to death with his bare hands on live TV and in front of millions of witnesses.

Nothing less is an appropriate punishment for someone who has so recklessly endangered the health and safety of every American citizen with his slavish acceptance of jackassical policies, his deliberate and considered adherence to policies rooted in grievous incompetence, and his own inability to think his way out of a wet paper bag on Ebola, or formulate a single idea or policy that hasn't had top be re-evaluated when the obvious and foreseeable consequences land on this repetitive stupidity with both feet.

His mere resignation wouldn't begin to atone for those sins, unless his farewell speech included a ride in a tumbrel cart, and a final stop at a working guillotine.

If this were a fairytale, someone would drop a house on him, or fetch a woodsman to chop him open with an axe. If this were a western, he'd have been thrown under a stampede of cattle long since. But it's Washington D.C., and evidently he hasn't killed enough people yet to have become permanently politically unviable.
It's bad enough the America has sailed into the iceberg Ebola by proceeding at full steam into a fog of incompetence so thick that it would blind a flock of eagles. But compounding that, at every step of this crisis, Frieden has been found scurrying along the deck, and drilling holes in the bottoms of the lifeboats.