Freedom! Liberty! Unless I'm scared, in which case: armed, individual quarantine enforcement! #Gimmetarianism
— @KagroX
USA Today:
Gov. Paul LePage said Wednesday that Ebola nurse Kaci Hickox was "unwilling" to follow state health guidelines and that he was seeking legal authority to force her to remain quarantined at a rural home in Maine for 21 days.
Hickox, who does not have any symptoms of the deadly virus, said Wednesday that she would not abide by quarantine rules that she said were "not scientifically nor constitutionally just."
"I don't plan on sticking to the guidelines," Hickox tells Today show's Matt Lauer via Skype. "I am not going to sit around and be bullied by politicians and forced to stay in my home when I am not a risk to the American public."
Pretty high correlation between strict state quarantine rules and Governors in both parties up for re-election. Governor Christie is a special case. He's not up for re-election but he thinks he should be president. He's also, by nature, a
bully who likes to yell at people .
NBC News:
Other states are taking a milder approach. Texas sent its chief health officer, Dr. David Lakey, to greet a returning nurse on Wednesday. And Governor Rick Perry called the nurse, who wasn’t named.
“In Texas, we have a great tradition of welcoming our heroes back home and this heroic individual deserves our appreciation, our compassion, and our utmost respect,” Perry said in a statement. “The tremendous work that she and so many other health care workers are doing in West Africa is making life better for those in afflicted countries and helps protect the rest of the world from the spread of this terrible disease; they are doing vitally important work that makes us all proud.”
The nurse has agreed to self-quarantine and is being lavished with praise in return.
“This health care hero has made a great sacrifice in traveling abroad to minister to those who are suffering,” Perry said. “Even now home in Texas, she continues to demonstrate her selflessness by agreeing to quarantine herself and further protect her fellow Texans.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says even that’s not necessary. All anyone returning from West Africa needs to do is self-monitor. People who cared for patients without protection, or those who had unprotected contact with a patient, should stay home, but nurses who wore protected gear don’t fall into this category and should simply be closely watched, the CDC advises.
Some states, such as California, are following these guidelines.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Brian Resnick:
Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, was born 100 years ago this week, and the contributions he made to science still save countless lives. That's because the scientific dogma behind his vaccine still holds true: If you expose a body to deactivated, noncontagious version of a virus, when a live bug comes along, that body will be ready.
The same principle would apply to an Ebola vaccine. That is, if one was available for the human body. Ebola vaccines exist, but until now, they have only been tested in monkeys.
Human clinical trials for an Ebola vaccine began only this year. The World Health Organization reports the data from these first tests will be available in December.
"We need to speed up that time point," says Clive Gray, a professor of immunology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. By December, the efforts may be too little, too late. And results from the first phase of trials don't mean wide-scale production. They mean more clinical trials. The time clock is grim and running thin: The most pessimistic scenarios predict as many as 1.4 million cases of the disease by January.
NY Times:
Three months after declaring West Africa’s Ebola epidemic a global emergency, the World Health Organization said Wednesday that new infections in Liberia, one of the worst affected countries, appeared to be declining. But the organization also warned against complacency in international efforts to fight the disease.
@TIMEHealth @MackayIM really? can we complacently panic?
— @DemFromCT
Bloomberg:
Louisiana has a message for many of the scientists and medical experts studying Ebola and aiding efforts to fight the deadly virus in West Africa -- stay away.
The state sent a letter yesterday to members of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which is holding its annual conference in New Orleans next week. If they’ve recently been to any of the West African countries where the virus has infected more than 13,000 people, they shouldn’t attend the meeting.
“We do hope that you will consider a future visit to New Orleans, when we can welcome you appropriately,” said Kathy Klieber, Louisiana’s Secretary of Health & Hospitals and Kevin Davis, director of the Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness, in the letter.
The society of researchers, medical professionals and scientists dates back more than a century, according to its website, and has members around the world.
John Cassidy:
Warren isn’t infallible. But, if any Democrat is likely to emerge from the midterms as a big winner, it is she. Over the past couple of weeks, she has been barnstorming around the country, campaigning for Democratic candidates, sounding like a reincarnated Eugene Debs or (to cross party lines) Teddy Roosevelt.
Larry Sabado, Kyle Kondick and Geoffrey Skelley:
While many races remain close, it’s just getting harder and harder to envision a plausible path for the Democrats to retain control of the Senate. Ultimately, with just a few days to go before the election, the safe bet would be on Republicans eventually taking control of the upper chamber.
We say eventually because there’s a decent chance we won’t know who wins the Senate on Election Night. Louisiana is guaranteed to go to a runoff, and Georgia seems likelier than not to do the same. The Georgia runoff would be Jan. 6, 2015, three days after the 114th Congress is scheduled to open. Vote-counting in some states, like Alaska, will take days, and other races are close enough to trigger a recount.
If the polls and models are correct, that's true. And yet...