On October 3, a series of high-ranking officials briefed reporters at the White House on the emerging Ebola threat.
Presiding over the briefing was Lisa Monaco, assistant to the President for Homeland Security.
The assembled dignitaries repeatedly assured their audience–reporters from the national media and those tuning in around the country–that there was nothing to worry about.
Lisa Monaco speaking at White House press conference on Ebola
As explained by Monaco:
“I want to emphasize that the United States is prepared to deal with this crisis both at home and in the region. Every Ebola outbreak over the past 40 years has been stopped.
“We know how to do this and we will do it again. With America’s leadership, I am confident, and President Obama is confident, that this epidemic will also be stopped.”
A little more than 30 years ago, America was facing another deadly epidemic–that of AIDS.
Officials at all levels of government–local, state and Federal–also repeatedly assured their fellow citizens they had nothing to worry about.
Everyone knew, after all, that only homosexuals having “unprotected sex” got AIDS.
So the warning went out: If you aren’t gay, you have nothing to worry about.
But then another group of AIDS-infected patients appeared: intravenous drug users.
So the message was revised: If you’re not gay, and you don’t use IV drugs, you’re OK.
Then a third group of at-risk people began showing up in doctors’ offices: Haitians.
So, once again, the warning was revised: If you aren’t gay, don’t use IV drugs, and you’re not from Haiti, you’ll be safe.
But then a fourth group of endangered citizens emerged: hemophiliacs.
So the warning was reissued as: If you’re not gay, don’t use IV drugs, aren’t Haitian and aren’t a hemophiliac needing blood transfusions, AIDS can’t touch you.
And then a fifth category of victims emerged: heterosexual women.
And, yet again, the warning was changed: If you’re not gay, don’t use IV drugs, aren’t Haitian, aren’t a hemophilic and aren’t a heterosexual woman….
The numbers of potential AIDS victims kept expanding–and giving the lie to all the comforting boilerplate churned out by PR machines.
Apparently, someone at the White House press conference on Ebola remembered that earlier scenario.
Because, to the obvious surprise of the assembled dignitaries, an anonymous reporter stated what was clearly on the minds of his viewing/listening audience:
“So help me understand–the stuff that you’ve talked about in terms of preparedness here in this country, the conversations with hospitals, the coordination with the local authorities and all seems very dissonant.
“I think to people in the country who look at basically the first case, or one of the first cases, and see that the whole thing broke down.
“At every step of the way there were breakdowns. It broke down, as the person back there was saying, when he [Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola patient who flew to Dallas from Liberia] lied on the form.
“It broke down when the hospital turned him away. It broke down when the materials that were in his apartment haven’t been thrown away.
“I mean, it feels like, to Americans, like you guys are up here talking about we have this great and perfect system that’s going to be able to contain this virus because we’ve done all this preparation, and yet it doesn’t look like it’s working.
“And so how should the regular or the average person have confidence that whether it’s the case in Howard or whether it’s some case somewhere else in the country at the moment, that somebody isn’t being turned away there?
“That somebody didn’t get–their temperature got taken in Africa but didn’t get caught, and so they’re on a plane as we speak? Square the dissonance between your confidence and the fact that things don’t seem to be working.”
It was the journalistic version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: The little boy’s pointing out that the emperor–for all the subservient flattery of his aides–didn’t have any clothes on.
Lisa Monaco fell back on boilerplate: “I think the American people should be confident for all the reasons that we have stated and the President has spoken to….”
She admitted that, yes, all the screw-ups the reporter had outlined had in fact happened: “And we have now seen one [Ebola] case, and as Dr. Fauci mentioned, it is entirely possible we will see another case.”
But she refused to admit that preventing other Ebola-infected Liberians from entering the United States was a commonsense approach.
She repeated what she had said earlier: “We have a public health infrastructure and medical professionals throughout this country who are capable of dealing with cases if they present themselves….”
In short, the United States can afford to be a dumping-ground for other countries’ deadly cast-offs.
And, somehow, everything would of course turn out all right.
