As a medical student at Columbia University, Frieden spent a month trailing his cardiologist father at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. He later told his brothers he learned more about medicine from their dad’s meticulous note-taking and attentiveness to patients than he ever did in a classroom. It was a lesson he took with him to India as a CDC expert on tuberculosis, where his program was credited with saving 3 million lives, and one he applied in New York as health commissioner, where he helped lead anti-smoking programs and a ban on trans fats.
.
To his supporters, the married father of two living near CDC headquarters in Atlanta is the best possible person for the job — smart, humble, calm, unfailingly altruistic.
Feh.
It’s not a good sign when freakin’ Nigeria’s public health system has done a better job containing their Ebola outbreak than we have. (If Nigeria makes it to Monday with no new cases, they will have stopped the spread within their own borders. Which they shut down weeks ago and then traced more than 18,000 people who may have been exposed.)
I really think people are being too hard on CDC Director Frieden. The guy has never had a job outside of government -- five years at the CDC, followed by NYC Health Commissioner (working on those contagious cigarettes and trans-fats), then back to lead(?) the CDC -- so what can you really expect? It’s not like he’s ever held a real job or been evaluated based on his actual performance.
LM is doing better each day. This makes me better but I did a number on my back yesterday so I am walking like an old man. I pulled it a few weeks ago helping Elena and I keep hurting again. I need to be more careful until it really recovers. I am still happy seeing her getting better. It should be about five weeks before she starts physical therapy.
Nigeria is much closer to the epicenter of the outbreak than the US is, yet even after Ebola entered the country in the most terrifying way possible — via a visibly sick passenger on a commercial flight — officials successfully shut down the disease and prevented widespread transmission. [W]hen Nigerian officials found out that a man who traveled to the country from Liberia was sick with Ebola, they quickly figured out who he had been in contact with and acted on that information to successfully contain the disease. Nigeria ended up seeing 19 confirmed cases of Ebola, but no new cases have been reported in over a month.
The Obama Administration: Less competent than Nigeria.
Let’s be fair. Nigeria does not need an excuse to keep it’s border open for new Democrat voters so it can admit there is a danger. What are a few thousand lives lost compared to the guaranteed future Democrat majority and the utopia that will assure us.
In the face of an epidemic they themselves have called potentially catastrophic, the White House has searched far and wide for an “Ebola Czar,” and chose someone, get this, whose political loyalty is unquestionable, but whose actual qualifications are nonexistent.
That Obama would appoint a long-time Democratic operative with zero public health or federal administrative experience tells us everything we need to know about how Obama views the Ebola panic: Ebola is a political problem for the White House, not a public health problem for the nation.
What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.
[yosemitesam]
Great hopping cat GIFs…it’s Friday, GN!!1!
[/yosemitesam]
The AP has a semi-fawning puff piece about bumbling, inept CDC head Tom Frieden this morning: Quiet ‘whiz kid’ now public face of Ebola fight:
Feh.
It’s not a good sign when freakin’ Nigeria’s public health system has done a better job containing their Ebola outbreak than we have. (If Nigeria makes it to Monday with no new cases, they will have stopped the spread within their own borders. Which they shut down weeks ago and then traced more than 18,000 people who may have been exposed.)
What a clusterfark.
Happy Friday, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Fatwa!
I really think people are being too hard on CDC Director Frieden. The guy has never had a job outside of government -- five years at the CDC, followed by NYC Health Commissioner (working on those contagious cigarettes and trans-fats), then back to lead(?) the CDC -- so what can you really expect? It’s not like he’s ever held a real job or been evaluated based on his actual performance.
Top. Men.
Hai, Mac!
How are you and Little Mouse?
LM is doing better each day. This makes me better but I did a number on my back yesterday so I am walking like an old man. I pulled it a few weeks ago helping Elena and I keep hurting again. I need to be more careful until it really recovers. I am still happy seeing her getting better. It should be about five weeks before she starts physical therapy.
How Nigeria Stopped Ebola
The Obama Administration: Less competent than Nigeria.
Let’s be fair. Nigeria does not need an excuse to keep it’s border open for new Democrat voters so it can admit there is a danger. What are a few thousand lives lost compared to the guaranteed future Democrat majority and the utopia that will assure us.
White House Appoints Ebola Czar
h/t AoSHQ
You might also want to read about the Ebola Czar we already have and why no one knows about her.