Warning: Globalism Is Hazardous to Your Health
Thursday, October 02, 2014 5:17 PM 
This week’s syndicated column
Common sense and love of country dictate that air travel to the United States from the West African Ebola hot-zone nations of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone be suspended until the highly contagious, highly lethal Ebola outbreak is over. That’s obvious. Thousands of travel visas issued by the U.S. to nationals in these same countries should be canceled. That’s obvious, too.
But President Obama isn’t taking such obvious measures to safeguard the American people. On the contrary, the administration is doing nothing to prevent Ebola from entering this country, even after the first case erupted on American soil in a Liberian tourist named Thomas Eric Duncan. Last month, Duncan, knowingly exposed to Ebola himself, traveled to Dallas from Monrovia, Liberia, with layovers in Brussels and Washington, D.C. Now, he is in an isolation ward in a Dallas hospital as health officials scramble to monitor 100 people Duncan came into contact with for signs of the killer virus.
The White House response? The Daily Caller’s headline says it all: “White House: We Won’t Stop People from the Ebola-Stricken Countries from Coming to the U.S.”
What explains this presidential cop-out? So far, the left side of the media seems to be taking heart from the unlikelihood that any – or, rather, very many – Americans will become infected with Ebola. They dutifully repeat the official mantra of multinational organizations such as the United Nations, the African Union and the World Health Organization that isolating Ebola-ravaged nations would only make the epidemic worse.
I understand that suspending commercial flights to the region makes it harder for U.N. officials to jet about, and yes, I’m sure it does take a chunk out of African tourism, but such concerns seem a tad secondary at this moment of crisis. Also, as National Review’s Jim Gerachty has pointed out, the U.S. and others weren’t so coy when it came to enforcing a de facto travel ban to Israel during the summer’s Gaza war. Meanwhile, isn’t it possible to halt commercial travel to these stricken countries without also prohibiting all humanitarian aid?
That sounds like a more sensible approach – worth trying, at least, to prevent the disease from spreading to unaffected nations. But I don’t think protecting unaffected nations is the guiding goal of the globalist organizations opposing measures to isolate the ravaged areas – and that includes the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden stated on Twitter: “the impulse to isolate countries may make #Ebola epidemic worse. Must use tried & true public health means to stop it.”
