Republicans really want to talk about Ebola again. In 2014, they hyped the Ebola outbreak to scare people into voting for Republicans. In 2020, they are hyping Ebola in an attempt to downplay the current coronavirus outbreak while pretending that their own Ebola response was vastly different from what it was.
“We work together, like we’ve done when we were in the majority with President Obama,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said Wednesday, “to make sure, whether it was Ebola or any other disease, that we were working with the president to combat it, not to try to find a way to divide the country, but by finding a way to work together.” This is, needless to say, not how it went down.
In 2014, Sen. Ted Cruz called President Barack Obama “fundamentally unserious” for following Centers for Disease Control recommendations and not banning travel from countries with Ebola cases. Joni Ernst, then a candidate for Senate, slammed Obama’s “failed leadership.” Sen. Tom Cotton blasted Obama for “not protecting our country and our families from Ebola.”
Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the United States in 2014, most of whom had been exposed to the virus while in Africa.
Donald Trump has had a lot to say about Ebola—in 2014 and now. In 2014, he used it to attack Obama, immigrants, aid workers … typical Trump stuff. One of his key attacks on Obama was that Ronald Klain, Obama’s Ebola czar, had “zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A TOTAL JOKE!” Trump has, of course, appointed Mike Pence to head his coronavirus efforts.
But, Trump explained to reporters on Wednesday, Ebola was different.
”This is a much different problem than Ebola,” he said. “Ebola, you disintegrated, especially at the beginning. They’ve made a lot of progress now on Ebola. But with Ebola—we were talking about it before—you disintegrated. If you got Ebola, that was it.”
For the record, Ebola does not cause people to “disintegrate.” It has a high fatality rate, around 50%, though the rate is higher in some outbreaks. But disintegration is not a symptom of Ebola.
“This one is different. Much different,” Trump continued. “This is a flu. This is like a flu. And this is a much different situation than Ebola.” In the same press conference, though, Trump expressed shock that the flu kills people—which it does, by the tens of thousands—and insisted that the flu’s fatality rate is higher than it is. Because if you admit that the flu’s fatality rate is 0.1% while COVID-19’s fatality rate is more like 2%, you might have to admit there’s a potential problem.
Ebola is a scary disease, no question. But right now, Republicans are using it not just to lie about their own partisan response in 2014 but also to distract from the global disease outbreak we actually face, today. And we need a focused, scientifically grounded response to this outbreak, now.