re: #287 opnion

Good morning. The acting Director of the CDC was on TV this morning.
He said pretty much what Napalitano said about closing the Southern Boarder during this emergency. The prevailing wisdom is that we already have Swine Flu cases, so it’s too late for that.
Is it just me, or does that sound silly?

No, not silly. Completely stupid.

One of the first principles of containing a contagious disease is keeping the infected people away from the ones who aren’t infected yet. Followed by “ring inoculations” of people who have been in contact with infected people to keep it from spreading like a Ponzi scheme. (The mathematics of disease contagion and pyramid rackets are remarjkkably similar.)

So far, neither the Mexican government (with its UK-style “national health care” system) or the U.S. government (with agencies like FEMA, Health and Human Services, etc.) have even attempted to do either one. In the case of Mexico, it’s just a “socialized medicine” system in its usual operational mode- doing as little as possible on the grounds that its minions get paid the same whether they do anything or not. Reports from Mexico indicate that their hospitals, etc., are refusing to treat potential flu patients for fear of the personnel- who have not been immunized - being infected. (Never mind that Tamiflu is an OTC drug in Mexico- apparently no one in their Ministry of Health can connect the dots.)

Up here, while 12 million doses of Tamiflu have been sent to the five states in which infected individuals (number now up to 40) have been identified, no “ring” immunizations have been done, because the State Health Departments are waiting for the go-ahead from DHS, namely Janet Napolitano- who is wandering around in a haze of bureaucratic doubletalk, and who apparently thinks the most important thing on her calendar is a meeting in Ottawa sometime late next month, at which she and her opposite numbers from Mexico and Canada will “decide on a strategy”. (Never mind all the experts from CDC and USAMRIID telling her what we should be doing, right now.)

What I’m seeing is a classic example of “analysis paralysis” at the national level in both countries- more or less thinking “if we ‘study’ the problem long enough, it will go away, and we won’t have to actually commit ourselves to any course of action that might need to be explained later.”

In Mexico’s case, it’s because their government ministry is full of time-servers who don’t care whether they do the job or not- like I said, they get paid either way.

Up here, the problem seems to be a combination of;

1. An administrator (Napolitano) who, in keeping with both the Peter Principle and Parkinson’s Law, has been promoted at least two levels beyond her level of incompetence, and has never been noted for being willing to do anything that might require her to put her career on the line to start with;

2. A group of higher authorities who are not listening to their own experts- mainly because they apparently have trouble with those experts being types they “disapprove” of on purely “philosophical” grounds (I mean, USAMRIID is Army, CDC is full of people who do experiments on poor defenseless bunnies, so both are Inherently Evil And Not To Be Trusted, in their universe): and

3. A Chief Executive (The One) who honestly does not understand the problem, and who is only getting advice from (1) and (2). And the actual experts can’t get through this cordon sanitaire’ of unicorn-handlers and puppy-sitters to actually explain The Facts of Life Re Contagious Diseases to Him.

I said before I was going to reserve judgment on this situation. It’s no longer reserved. If The One and his minions do not get off their collective a$$ and let the pros do their job, we are looking at a serious cluster-f**k on the public health front. Period. Dot.

cheers

eon