EDITORIAL: Politicized Ebola response a disservice to public health

While there may be no need for the American people to panic — yet — about the unfolding Ebola crisis, the public’s increasing worry is not based on misguided fear. No, the American people are alarmed because Washington in general and the Obama administration in particular have a long track record of incompetence (and worse) in dealing with a multitude of issues, and their response to the Ebola crisis is no exception.

First identified in Africa in 1976, Ebola is a virus with a fatality rate of 70 percent. While the disease is not extremely contagious, it is very infectious, as it only takes a minuscule amount to cause illness. Health officials are using several experimental drugs in the fight against Ebola, but unlike the flu, there are currently no drugs or vaccines approved in the United States to treat or prevent the disease.

In short, the best defense against Ebola is to stop it from coming to the United States in the first place, and while all flights into the U.S. from the three nations most affected by the disease — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea—are now being funneled into five airports with systems in place to monitor passengers, the fact that the epidemic has spread even this far is unfathomable.

The mission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to control and prevent disease. It is mind-boggling that it took the spread of Ebola in Dallas to get the CDC to really put a plan in place of rushing experts to the scene of a confirmed case and moving patients to hospitals capable of treating them safely.

At the end of September, CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden declared that he had “no doubt” that Ebola would be stopped “in its tracks in the U.S.,” but news of the infection of two health care workers in Dallas, as well as last week’s news that a doctor in New York had contracted the disease, has raised doubts among the American people.

President Obama, too, is trying to rally the nation, saying that he is “cautiously optimistic” about the situation. But the man the president tapped to coordinate the response to the disease, Ron Klain, has yet to speak publicly about the crisis, which is perhaps not too surprising considering his prior resume.

Klain, a lawyer, has no health care experience. Before being named Ebola czar, he served as a senior White House aide to President Obama and as chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, former Vice President Al Gore and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. Klain headed up Vice President Gore’s effort during the 2000 Florida recount, and while working for Vice President Biden, he had a key role in implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, including aggressively pushing for — and signing off on — the controversial $535 million loan guarantee for failed solar panel maker Solyndra.

“God forbid we appoint a doctor or epidemiologist,” said U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, a member the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform currently looking into the crisis.

On the surface, Farenthold’s comment might seem like a throwaway line, but it highlights the Obama administration’s willingness to politicize virtually everything, including public health. Ebola is a threat to national security, as well as the global economy, and it should be treated as such. The federal government is so big, so unaccountable and so political that it can only live down to Americans’ low expectations.

But politics goes both ways, and Americans should vote accordingly next week.