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Ebola Does Not Require an "Ebola Czar," Nor Calling Up the National Guard
Lasrick writes: David Ropeik explores risk-perception psychology and Ebola in the U.S. "[O]fficials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain's fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. ... People worry more about risks that are new and unfamiliar. People worry more about risks that cause greater pain and suffering. People worry more about threats against which we feel powerless, like a disease for which there is no vaccine and which has a high fatality rate if you get it. And people worry more about threats the more available they are to their consciousness—that is, the more aware people are of them."
If having a Czar will concentrate more power in their hands then a Czar is what they'll create. We already have the CDC. If this were about solving disease problems then the President would give the CDC more funding if they needed it. This is not about solving problems but about power.
Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
More americans have married Kim Kardashian than have died from Ebola.
And what is the land of the free creating more czar's for? a czar answers to no one. Instead how about we make the people in charge responsible for their actions. oh wait congress can never take responsibility for their failures.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The most effective counter to the epidemic of fear this article talks about is for the government to convince people that it is following an effective policy to address the dangers. Unfortunately, our politicians have gotten the idea that the best way to do that is to manage the "optics" of the situation. As a result, people are convinced that the government's responses to this danger are designed more to convince people that the government is doing the right thing that to actually DO the right thing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The Obama Administration (and Bush / McCain / Romney would have been no better) looked around and were thinking ... hmmm... who could we appoint for this? An expert in epidemiology? Somebody with experience in coordinating the logistics of an emergency response? A useless public relations shill? Or an even more useless lawyer crony with connections to that epic success Solyndra?
Yeah, that last one sounds about right. We'll go with that.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Fear is relatively easy to manage if you actually have, you know, the peoples' trust. Imagine that. Why, if the public was actually used to the government telling the truth (including telling them when something was actually potentially detrimental to national security, rather than using that as an excuse to obscure _everything_) I'll bet you could just be honest with them and people would be rather rational about the whole thing. Lie through your teeth and then blame it on your predecessors or people you have appointed and you get the current situation.
Then again, who among us today has any experience in an environment where people were actually being honest, even a majority of the time, and especially in any governmental context? The closest you'd get to that today would be certain military units and small teams at companies.
This sort of thing, shelter in place, what's happening in the Poconos, the police response to the Boston bombers is to acclimatize the sheep to a police state
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The fools are yelling for an Ebola Czar.
Perhaps filling the position of Surgeon General would be simpler. Controlling the spread of disease is one of the functions of that office.
But, approving the the candidate for the office would require the Senate to actually do something.
You don't have to be a risk-perception psychologist to get what's going on.
Nutty people said, "Do something!!!!"
So we have a czar.
FTFY
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
While this is a Fox News topic, the comments are not as bad as what you would get there.
For example not one reference to Obola yet.
Yes, it's the fear of Ebola that's the bigger practical problem. However, the remedy for that fear is precisely doing things like declaring an Ebola 'Czar' and promising to deploy the National guard 'if necessary'. Note they didn't actually call up the national guard, just promised the obvious, if the national guard is warranted (it won't be) it will be called up. The nomination of a 'Czar' is pretty much free and convening ' a two-hour emergency meeting with every top federal official involved in public health and safety.' is actually not that terrible either. These measures are not a big deal in cost, but are important in their significance to the general populace.
So someone who is well informed may rightfully see all this as silly from a practical perspective, but I don't think they would perceive a significant investment of real resources in any of it.
Meanwhile those inclined to not be so well informed are assured by some response that really doesn't cost much.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Would all of this talk about a Czar be an end run around the current problem of the Repubs blocking all nominations for a Surgeon General? Maybe that's the only way the administration feels they can have a real working department head?
It would go a long way if the US refused direct commercial flights to and from the countries with outbreaks, and refused entry to anyone that has been in one of those countries in the past 3 weeks. The exception would be for US citizens and they should go through quarantine.
The _actual_ infectivity rate of ebola strongly suggests that it isn't airborne at all, and even droplet spread is not a very significant factor
While you are correct that the airborne vector isn't significant need I remind you that Ebola is not a disease whereby the person infected with it gets a mild fever and minor headache and the cure is two aspirin tablets?
The droplet spread may not be significant but when we consider the outcome --- in the case of Ebola, even something that is NOT supposed to be significant must be accounted for - or people die
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We assumed we could easily handle Ebola if it came our way, because we are the most powerful and richest country on Earth. What we should have done is asked, "What are our weaknesses? Where is our medical system likely to fail?" Unfortunately we tend to suck at this kind of introspection. If we had asked, the most glaring weakness in our system, "Not everybody has medical coverage", might have been considered. Then when a sick black man recently arrived from West Africa came to the hospital without medical insurance we might have thought "EBOLA" and treated him right away, instead of thinking "poor Nigger, not gonna pay his bills" and sent him home with some Tylenol.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
If you're a kid and you haven't had a polio shot, you're at greater risk of that.
Especially if you're at a school for rich kids.
If you're an adult, your best advice is to get a flu shot.
Early symptoms of flu are similar. If you get a flu shot, you won't be put in isolation until we know you don't have Ebola.
That said, you really shouldn't worry about Ebola if you live in the US. Unless you recently went to Africa.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The funny thing is it's the cut in NIH funding that means we don't have vaccines, not the cut in CDC funding, which only manages it after it spreads.
CDC means Center for Disease Control
NIH means National Institute for Health
That and the cut for health care in Texas that increased the risk factors.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
or you were a health care worker caring for Duncan. Or happened to live in the apartment complex where Duncan stayed. Or you happened to be on a flight from Texas to Ohio. Or on a flight from Ohio to Texas. Or one of those within 2 degrees of separation of any of these.
On the face of it, sending un-trained US miltary personnel into the hot zone makes zero sense. So why might they have been sent?
The 101st and National Guard aren't being sent to mitigate the situation in Liberia et al. in any meaningful way. They're been sent for training.
Worst case scenario, if the virus causes serious disruption in the US, troops with Liberian experience will be used to train up stateside forces to back up health workers and quell unrest. As a bonus some of the surviving infected troops will have immunity to the virus.
OTOH, Maybe I'm giving Obola credit for a level of cynicism that isn't there. Maybe the administration really is the most incompetent in US history.
Or maybe, just maybe, the US military (or any functional military for that matter) has the only organization structure, money and manpower to deal with these sorts of major threats.
Don't you watch any televison?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
People are prone to panic about these things--it goes back centuries, to when you didn't even really have government being an issue here. One of the major ways the Black Death spread is people fleeing it. What's changed is that we don't really use the fear productively--we aren't using it to go "Yes, you should be scared, this is the sort of thing quarantine exists for, let's bring it back."
The last time we had actual major-level quarantines going down was nearly 75 years ago, and the really nasty thing is that we have known pretty much the entire time that something like this was certain to happen. The questions have only been 'what' and 'when,' but people have been rather too gormless to listen, complaining about it being so antiquated & saying it's been just so long and antibiotics will work forever and vaccines are magical enough to have permanently banished those icky disease demons...and never listening when told that the Sword of Damocles will fall.
The worst part, in some ways, is that we do have the technology to make people a lot less likely to mind being stuck in a room for days on end. It's called 'the internet.'
I wish they'd focus more on things like MRSA and KPC which kills far more people in this country and are far more deadly. These diseases are easily spread and there is no cure for them. While not trying to diminish the cause to fight Ebola, frankly there are a lot of things far deadlier in this country that people should be worried about.
The cases in Texas I think can be squarely blamed on incompetence from the Dallas hospital.
In the case of KPC, Congress has basically put their head in the sand and handtied the CDC and FDA from effectively studying and fighting it, thanks to the livestock lobbies Frontline has a good episode on this. It doesn't help that congress has cut the budget of the CDC significantly over the last decade and played politics to make it difficult to study and fight the causes.
As it is, the CDC had to cut back on their research on Ebola due to the budget cuts and the delays in the worldwide community for fighting and funding the fighting of Ebola aren't helping matters either. If the Dallas hospital wasn't so incompetent, there's a good chance Thomas might have survived and nobody else would have become infected.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The US military personnel sent to Liberia are there to build some treatment centers and to expedite logistics for materials to fight the epidemic. They are not treating or even being exposed to the people who are contagious with Ebola. Your post is just more fear mongering.
"[O]fficials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology .. People worry more about risks that are new and unfamiliar."
The solution is to gather up all those talking-heads at Faux News (including the one with the plastic hair) and lock them up in Guantamino ref.
Here to prove John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, are we?
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
For those interested, I made a timeline of Ron Klain's life.
If Ebola were even half as transmissible as the flu I'd stock up my pantry and not leave my house for two months. Fortunately it's so hard to transmit to others that it has no chance of reaching epidemic proportions in a country like the US with a first world health system. It's difficult to be perfect and there may be a few cases that slip through the cracks like Thomas Duncan but even if some ISIS terrorist tried to bring it here deliberately there's no chance for it to develop into a widespread epidemic as long as it's so difficult to transmit.
1. Saturate media with Ebola
2. Conduct a survey of how scared everyone is of Ebola. Report your findings on TV. Update results often so you and your audience know how your doing.
3. Watch political response to incited fear yield new policy while retroactively criticizing x, y and z for not freaking out from the beginning.
4. Dedicate portions of your non-stop coverage to resulting overreactions.
Ebola is a real issue that must be address. It is growing exponentially, and the epidemic must be controlled and halted by an international cooperation before it either becomes a) endemic or b) pandemic.
People are scared by the very real numbers alone, the mere mention of those numbers, and the uncertainty of the statistics themselves, in part because they don't understand 1st) probability and 2nd) medicine.
When you point out that we shouldn't have to worry for at least another year, and that along the way there will be clear signs as to whether the situation is getting better or is worsening, giving us time to prepare, then they freak out even more, when it should actually satiate their fear, because it proves their fear of a slight chance of immediate threat is misplaced. It's as if a longer range perspective where we have time to watch and judge and plan makes them feel like the inevitability of an approaching disaster is more certain, when it's not.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Not entirely true, caught early enough and given proper hydration, ebola has a much less devastating death rate.
Addressing this as a purely american issue.
Ebola has the potential in africa to hit really quite scary numbers, quite fast.
10000 new cases per week in a couple of months are not looking unlikely.
This will spread over the world - admittedly greatly less in 'the west' and risks becoming a long-term health problem for americans - both in Africa and heavily infected regions, and in people travelling from them.
This both affects trade, and causes increase direct costs for stuff like extra screening.
Putting in the funds to kill the disease in Africa now - even with some deaths of US personel - could be significantly cheaper than allowing it to grow exponentially uncontained - at which point the 'leakers' from the hot zone vastly go up in number increasing expense and causing much harsher travel restrictions.
In a country like Liberia with its poor transportation systems I think the 101st Airborne Division with their helicopters and skilled pilots is one of the things you need to deliver material and personnel in the area. From the Whitehouse Fact Sheet on the response:
Scaling-up the DoD presence in West Africa. Following the completion of AFRICOM’s assessment, DoD announced the planned deployment of 3,200 troops, including 700 from the 101st Airborne Division headquarters element to Liberia. These forces will deploy in late October and become the headquarters staff for the Joint Forces Command, led by Major General Gary Volesky. The total U.S. troop commitment will depend on the requirements on the ground;
So out of at least 3,200 troops only 700 of them are from the 101st Airborne and the other units are yet to be specified. It makes sense to jump start the transportation system so the guys that follow can hit the ground running (or at least jogging ;). If there are 100 choppers and pilots it probably takes the other 600 to support them. You need mechanics, airfield personnel for things like fueling and air traffic control, a kitchen to feed 700 people or more, a medical unit and the officers to manage it all.
Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.
and FEAR!
There has been a bit of work on three approaches with at least one completing animal testing. It may not be in the news but some people have cared enough to put more than a decade of work in.
But irrational people insist on it.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Apparently humans normally do not act on reason at all. Recent experiments suggest that we act on emotions completely and then build a logical excuse for out actions or thoughts. We are a very screwed up species.
When did you move into management?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
When he needed more time to post to /. ?
Your day is kinda long, but make it a bit longer and we won't need leap days.
It's a riot that at the top of this (otherwise sensible) article is a Doomsday Clock announcing that humankind is "5 Minutes to Midnight." That's closer than it was for much of the cold war! Sure there's a pretty good chance some third-world nutjob will get his hands on a tiny nuke soon, and yes, over the next CENTURY, several million people will need to migrate inland to avoid flooding, and probably learn to farm different crops.
But Doomsday? In five minutes?
That clock is, literally, the single most needlessly alarmist message coming from "experts" since... Ever.
Also because there's little to study, it's hard to test a vaccine, and its also downright dangerous to study. Mundane pathogens that nonetheless kill a lot of people have the delightful property of being almost completely survivable if you contract them accidentally in a research setting.
Wrong, entertainment network. Remember, courts have said news is entertainment in England and the US. The rest of the world gets news, we get entertained, or lied to.
This is a good article and a good post, but the "Czar" thing isn't reflected in the article itself, so it's a bit of creativity on the part of the submitter.
The issue here is the mainstream media, which have seized on this and are whipping up people's emotions. No one expected anything else from tv "journalism" these days, but still, it's pathetic to see how it is playing out. I live in West Africa in a country that until recently was exposed to ebola. There was a patient living not more than 5 miles from my house. But life here is surprisingly calm and people are not panicking in any way, shape, or form.
Back in the States it's panic and mayhem, and as seen from abroad it looks like a big joke, which is exactly what news media have become. It's too bad.
On Reddit they had a contest to complete the sentence, "than have gotten ebola in the United States." One of the winners was, "More people have married Kim Kardashian ..."
Keep it perspective, people.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
If there were a vaccine, the anti-vacciners would be all over it.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Appointing an Ebola Czar is about managing fear. People don't think the government is doing enough and people think the CDC and health care workers at the Dallas hospital fucked up. That's why there is an Ebola Czar. You'd think the person who wrote this article would understand that very simple point.
Well, if they're going to force me to tow something, maybe I don't want to have that kind of funding. I "toe the line" that towing is hard work, and I'm allergic to hard work!
At least you get a choice in who you can vote for - people who feed their families on foodstamps _forced_ to vote for the Democrats and do not have a voting choice.
I've seen this happen at a lot of large bureaucracies, including my own company - problem arises, and CEO feels compelled to appoint a special "czar" to deal with the problem. This only creates additional problems:
- Being appointed directly by the executive, the czar is not responsible to anyone
- The special czar will be appointed without any additional budget, and thus has no power
- Being outside of the conventional hierarchy, no one reports to him, and thus will find difficulty obtaining cooperation from other groups
- Responsibility for the problem will already be clearly defined in the existing hierarchy - appointing a czar will only confuse existing responsibilities and create conflict with the group responsible for the problem.
I foresee the same problems arising here if an "Ebola czar" is created.
watch, it's going to be the gays, jews, blacks, asians, latinos or arabs... whichever group he hates most.
No, Fox news told the court that they were entertainment, not news.
Which meant that the court ruled that, being entertainment, not news, they had no duty of accuracy.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I always thought it funny that in the US there seems to be this fear of socialism and communism, yet lately they appoint Czar's to everything it seems, which are most commonly attributed to pre-communist Russia...
Foreshadowing of things to come?
Being named Ebola Czar pretty much guarantees you'll never have a date again.
I don't know, ask the media why they like nicknaming executive-level governement offices, "Czars", as there are no positions with Czar as (or in) the official title. However, the tradition seems to go back to Franklin Roosevelt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
...Obama has no leadership experience at all. He procrastinates making decisions, and when shit fails he blames someone else. He's never accountable for anything.
Who would have thought that a community organizer and a state senator with a record number of "present votes" can't lead.
Weird.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
as above poster stated... it's typically too deadly to be widespread. An outbreak usually kills less than a hundred people and occurs pretty sporadically.
just looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
the first listing they have is 1976. before this current outbreak you were averaging 44 deaths per year... globally?
meanwhile, wikipedia lists the average lightning strike fatalities for the US at 40-50 annually... at a 10-20% fatality rate.
you were literally more likely to be struck by lightning in the US than die of ebola before this current outbreak.
and apparently hippos kill 2800 people annually... so there's that.
So yeah, not a priority.