My unhinged rant about Ebola

You can find it at Medium:

If you’re reading this in the United States, it would be understandable if any or all of the above was news to you. Here, instead of focusing on leading an international relief effort (an Ebola Marshall Plan, if you like) to contain and mitigate the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the leaders and media of The World’s Indispensable Nation have elected to have a full-on meltdown over the spread of Ebola to America. Here we’ve seen all of nine confirmed Ebola cases (five of whom were diagnosed with the disease while still in Africa, and only two of whom contracted the virus here in the U.S.) with one fatality, Liberian traveler Thomas Eric Duncan (whose outcome might have been different if his hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas, hadn’t inexplicably waited four days to start treating him for the disease). So you can clearly understand why we don’t have any time to pay attention to what’s happening in West Africa; there’s just too much nothing to talk about here instead.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The focus here, instead of the tremendous suffering and potential for disaster in West Africa, has been blinding terror at the prospect of a massive Ebola outbreak in America, an scenario whose currently infinitesimal likelihood is actually being increased to the extent that the panic over that possibility is hindering efforts to stop the outbreak at its source. With an election fast approaching, Ebola fears are being manipulated by cynical politicians willing to distract and panic voters if it helps them win. They’ve been aided in this effort by a media that can’t seem to tell the difference between an “infectious disease expert” and a “human being capable of the power of speech,” and a national health-care establishment that (rightly) continues to urge a calm, rational response to the disease while (unfortunately) presiding over a series of errors and mistakes that only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in its ability to control the situation.

The whole thing was a sort of stream of consciousness of everything that’s been eating at me about the Ebola story, so hopefully it makes sense at least in segments if not in total.