Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan complains that in his testimony to Congress, CDC Director Thomas Frieden "did not explain his or the government's thinking on the reasons for opposition to a travel ban," at least in terms that she could comprehend.
Which is odd, because I thought Frieden explained it pretty well.
- It wouldn't work. If we bar people from that region from interacting with the outside world legally, they will do so anyway, but in undetectable ways that will make the disease much harder to screen, track and stop. (There are no direct flights between North America and the countries affected by Ebola, meaning people coming here from that region could be flying in from almost anywhere.)
- Most of West Africa's interaction with the rest of the world is by air, and if that is shut down, its economy will collapse and people will flee ... making the disease much harder to track and stop. As Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, explained recently: "If we completely isolate them… we know from experience with public health, that marginalizes them. You can have civil unrest, governments can fall. Then you wind up having spread of the virus to other countries in West Africa, which would only compound the problem."
- The international public-health community is heavily reliant on commercial air service to bring equipment and personnel. Replacing that capacity with charters would be enormously expensive, time-consuming and probably logistically impossible. "We need the flights to operate. That's the bottom line," says Tim Shenk, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders.
- Think it through. Let's say you are in the affected areas and want to leave. As long as healthy people are allowed to travel, you go through the screening process, have your temperature checked, answer a few questions and leave. If no one is allowed to travel, many will still try to do so. But they won't be screened, they won't be questioned and we won't be able to trace them and those with whom they've had contact should they become ill.
However, what I found most striking was Noonan's argument that a travel ban is so elementary that even children would know it's the right thing to do:
The children would reply: "Close the door." One would add: "Just for a while, while you figure out how to treat everyone getting sick." Another might say: "And keep going outside the door in protective clothing with medical help." Eleven-year-olds would get this one right without a lot of struggle."
It seems to me that there's a reason that we don't let 11-year-olds drive, vote, carry sidearms or run national public-health bureaucracies in a time of controversy. The world is not quite as simple as it appears to be at that age; it has a lot more interconnected moving parts, and in the years between age 11 and age 30, 40, 50 and 60, you learn some things.
Noonan and others may believe that scientists who have faced down SARS, polio, tuberculosis and other deadly contagions are no smarter than fifth-graders. I do not.
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