The one thing Americans expect the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to do in the case of an Ebola outbreak is to run to the location with spacesuits, procedures and protocols. The CDC has ONE JOB: To send teams to outbreak locations to ensure everyone knows what to do and how to protect themselves and others. Yet, after all the happy talk assurances that “We got this,” the CDC admits it did not do that:
The nation’s top disease-fighting agency acknowledged Tuesday that an American nurse might not have been infected with Ebola if a special response team had been sent to Dallas immediately after a Liberian man there was diagnosed with Ebola.
The stark admission from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came as the World Health Organization projected the pace of infections accelerating in West Africa — to as many as 10,000 new cases a week within two months.
CDC director Tom Frieden outlined a series of steps designed to stop the spread of the disease in the U.S., including increased training for health-care workers and changes at the Texas hospital where the virus was diagnosed to minimize the risk of more infections.
Sending teams to infected areas is the least of what Americans expect of the CDC. Sending a team in the event of an outbreak is a basic.
The Left and the CDC can crybaby all day long about (phantom) budget cuts, but if the CDC isn’t going to do the LEAST of what’s expected from them in this circumstance, we don’t need a CDC.
Anyone who has seen the movie “Outbreak” or any film or television show about any kind of plague apparently understands better than the CDC exactly what it is the CDC is supposed to do.
Instead, we suffered through two weeks of CDC director Frieden arrogantly telling us Rubes to settle down and not panic.
Well, we Rubes weren’t panicking. What we wanted was less arrogance, more concern, and a Federal Agency with a $6.9 billion annual budget to do the one job expected of them.
This is the danger of centralized government. If you have only one institution and it fails, we’re all screwed.
Anyone who counts on or argues for a centralized government to take care of anything is a fool.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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