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Weekly Address: President Obama – Focused on the Fight Against Ebola

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The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

 

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, the President discussed the measures we are taking to respond to Ebola cases at home, while containing the epidemic at its source in West Africa. This week, we continued to focus on domestic preparedness, with the creation of new CDC guidelines and the announcement of new travel measures ensuring all travelers from the three affected countries are directed to and screened at one of five airports.

The President emphasized that it’s important to follow the facts, rather than fear, as New Yorkers did yesterday when they stuck to their daily routine. Ebola is not an easily transmitted disease, and America is leading the world in the fight to stamp it out in West Africa.

Transcript: Weekly Address: Focused on the Fight Against Ebola

Hi everybody, this week, we remained focused on our fight against Ebola.  In Dallas, dozens of family, friends and others who had been in close contact with the first patient, Mr. Duncan, were declared free of Ebola-a reminder that this disease is actually very hard to catch.  Across Dallas, others being monitored-including health care workers who were most at risk-were also declared Ebola-free.

Two Americans-patients in Georgia and Nebraska who contracted the disease in West Africa-recovered and were released from the hospital.  The first of the two Dallas nurses who were diagnosed-Nina Pham-was declared Ebola free, and yesterday I was proud to welcome her to the Oval Office and give her a big hug.  The other nurse-Amber Vinson-continues to improve as well.  And in Africa, the countries of Senegal and Nigeria were declared free of Ebola-a reminder that this disease can be contained and defeated.

In New York City, medical personnel moved quickly to isolate and care for the patient there-a doctor who recently returned from West Africa.  The city and state of New York have strong public health systems, and they’ve been preparing for this possibility.  Because of the steps we’ve taken in recent weeks, our CDC experts were already at the hospital, helping staff prepare for this kind of situation.  Before the patient was even diagnosed, we deployed one of our new CDC rapid response teams. And I’ve assured Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio that they’ll have all the federal support they need as they go forward.

More broadly, this week we continued to step up our efforts across the country.  New CDC guidelines and outreach is helping hospitals improve training and protect their health care workers.  The Defense Department’s new team of doctors, nurses and trainers will respond quickly if called upon to help.

New travel measures are now directing all travelers from the three affected countries in West Africa into five U.S. airports where we’re conducting additional screening.  Starting this week, these travelers will be required to report their temperatures and any symptoms on a daily basis-for 21 days until we’re confident they don’t have Ebola.  Here at the White House, my new Ebola response coordinator is working to ensure a seamless response across the federal government.  And we have been examining the protocols for protecting our brave health care workers, and, guided by the science, we’ll continue to work with state and local officials to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety and health of the American people.

In closing, I want to leave you with some basic facts.  First, you cannot get Ebola easily.  You can’t get it through casual contact with someone.  Remember, down in Dallas, even Mr. Duncan’s family-who lived with him and helped care for him-even they did not get Ebola.  The only way you can get this disease is by coming into direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone with symptoms.  That’s the science.  Those are the facts.

Sadly, Mr. Duncan did not survive, and we continue to keep his family in our prayers.  At the same time, it’s important to remember that of the seven Americans treated so far for Ebola-the five who contracted it in West Africa, plus the two nurses from Dallas-all seven have survived.  Let me say that again-seven Americans treated; all seven survived.  I’ve had two of them in the Oval Office.  And now we’re focused on making sure the patient in New York receives the best care as well.

Here’s the bottom line.  Patients can beat this disease.  And we can beat this disease.  But we have to stay vigilant.  We have to work together at every level-federal, state and local.  And we have to keep leading the global response, because the best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source-in West Africa.

And we have to be guided by the science-we have to be guided by the facts, not fear.  Yesterday, New Yorkers showed us the way. They did what they do every day-jumping on buses, riding the subway, crowding into elevators, heading into work, gathering in parks.  That spirit-that determination to carry on-is part of what makes New York one of the great cities in the world.  And that’s the spirit all of us can draw upon, as Americans, as we meet this challenge together.

Bolding added.

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17 comments

  1. JanF



    President Barack Obama greets Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse diagnosed with Ebola after caring for an infected patient in Texas, in the Oval Office, Oct 24, 2014. Pham is virus-free after being treated at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

  2. JanF

    A New Solar Energy Job-Training Pilot Program for Veterans

    Solar energy is shattering records in the United States. Since President Obama took office, installed solar power has increased 13-fold, topping nearly 16 gigawatts today – enough to power the equivalent of 3.2 million average American homes. As solar energy continues to grow, it is becoming a major source of high-paying American jobs – employing nearly 143,000 full-time professionals last year.

    During the next decade, the solar industry is slated to grow even more. The next generation of skilled professionals will be key to the industry’s effort to meet the demand for this clean, renewable energy. That’s why the Energy Department is launching a pilot solar installation training program to provide military veterans who are transitioning out of active duty with the skills needed to become the leaders of the nation’s clean energy economy.

    The solar industry has long taken a leading role in hiring veterans, employing more service members than any other sector in the U.S. Building on this tradition, the SunShot Initiative’s Solar Instructor Training Network – which aims to train 50,000 new solar installers in total by 2020, some of who will be veterans – is partnering with up to three military bases to create a veterans solar job training pilot project this fall.

    The new training project will connect up to 30 motivated, tech-savvy military personnel at each base with SunShot-supported accredited solar training institutions. Ultimately, lessons learned from this first successful pilot will enable the Energy Department and military branches to expand solar training access to interested veterans, tapping into the Department’s nearly 400 solar training partner institutions nationwide.

  3. JanF

    The GOP’s Weird Science on Ebola

    Here’s Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, demanding the appointment of an Ebola czar with a medical degree at one moment, and then dismissing the advice of medical experts in another: “I want a doctor telling me how to deal with this,” he told Fox News this week. But earlier this month, he dismissed health experts while pitching a travel ban:”The Centers for Disease Control said that that would exacerbate the problem. I don’t understand why that would be the case,” Chaffetz told CNN.

    Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., made both points in the same statement. “One would think, faced with the prospect of an epidemic, the president would task an expert in epidemiology, not an expert in political spin,” he said in a press release last week. “We need to be barring visas and travel from Ebola-impacted regions.”

    We need, in other words, to empower medical professionals, then ignore them verily.

    Conservatives do have good ideas on the Ebola crisis. The House Doctors Caucus, for instance, suggests imposing a 21-day quarantine on Americans returning from countries affected by Ebola who have been exposed to the virus. Such a policy could have prevented Spencer from going bowling and riding on the subway before testing positive for Ebola. But their reasonable ideas are undercut by their fixation on a travel ban from these African countries.

  4. JanF

    Nurse Quarantined After Treating Ebola Patients Criticizes New Rules

    A nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined upon her arrival at a New Jersey airport Friday – and who later tested negative for the disease – is criticizing how she was treated, describing a chaotic scene where she was made to feel like a criminal.

    In a first-person account in the Dallas Morning News, nurse Kaci Hickox said of her three-hour wait at Newark Liberty International Airport: “No one seemed to be in charge. No one would tell me what was going on or what would happen to me.” An hour later, with little to eat or drink in the meantime, a forehead-scanning thermometer found her temperature to be 101 degrees but staffers refused to use an oral thermometer, which Hickox said would be more accurate. […]

    “This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me. I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine,” she said.

    She tested negative. She does not have Ebola. Yet she will be quarantined because she went to West Africa to fight Ebola at its source which involves caring for people with the disease.

    We are lucky that the people who are volunteering to do that work are not meanspirited jerks like Cuomo and Christie. Otherwise they would say “to hell with it”,  no one would go to Africa to help eradicate this disease and we would be, quite literally, in a world of hurt.

  6. JanF


    NY Times Breaking News Mon 10/27/14 8:31 AM

    Quarantined Nurse Can Go Home if C.D.C. Approves, Christie Says

    A nurse who recently returned from West Africa and was quarantined for the past three days in a tent behind a New Jersey hospital despite having no symptoms associated with Ebola will be allowed to return home to serve out the rest of her mandatory quarantine.

    Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, in a brief interview, said that he expected her to be transferred Monday morning after doctors and federal officials signed off on the plan.

    The treatment of the nurse, Kaci Hickox, has drawn withering criticism from both public health officials and the nurse herself. Ms. Hickox lives in Fort Kent, Maine.

    READ MORE

  7. JanF

    Yale Student Held In Ebola Quarantine Speaks Out

    When he was released from Yale-New Haven Hospital on Oct. 18, a doctor told Ryan Boyko that he was arguably the only person in New Haven he knew for a fact did not have Ebola.

    Boyko remembers doctors telling him: You are healthy, you have no symptoms. There’s no reason to have any kind of precautions.

    So why is he quarantined with a police car parked in front of his house to ensure that no one goes in or out?

    Boyko, a third-year student in Yale’s School of Public Health who spent three weeks working in Liberia on a computerized disease-tracking system, attributes it to politics and irrational fear. He’s worried that quarantine policies like those in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and other states could seriously undermine the fight against Ebola in West Africa. […]

    Boyko fears that the threat of a 21-day quarantine upon return from West Africa – even if a traveler or humanitarian aid worker shows no symptoms of Ebola – might discourage the medical and other help needed in the region.

    He was sent to the hospital after having some symptoms (high fever, diarrhea) and tested negative for Ebola. He remained under quarantine:

    When the second and final test came back negative the next day, that was when Boyko said doctors told him he was healthy and could be released without having to take any precautions.

    But that was also when he was shocked to learn that under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s new policies for monitoring travelers from West Africa, that he would subject to a quarantine.

    Malloy has said that health Commissioner Jewel Mullen will decide on a case-by-case basis if a traveler should be quarantined. “Under these guidelines, a person held under quarantine is not sick, but is kept away from other people because they may have been exposed to an infectious or contagious disease,” according to a statement released by the governor’s office.

    Home quarantine, not so bad? Think again:

    “But if you are forced to stay in one place against your will, the walls of even your own house start to feel like a prison … The psychology of being somewhere and told that you can’t leave and to have a police car stationed there to prevent you from leaving … ‘

  8. JanF

    CDC Chief Announces New Shift In Ebola Protocols

    The new protocol stops short of the mandatory 21-day quarantines that some states have begun requiring. Instead, Frieden said, it relies on individual assessment and close monitoring. He also detailed several categories of risk among both airline passengers and the medical volunteers who he said have been doing “heroic work” in West Africa.

    “High risk” individuals, Frieden said, include those who have cared for an Ebola patient and were accidentally poked by a needle or lacked protective gear. Those people, Frieden said, should isolate themselves in their homes and avoid all forms of mass transit and large gatherings.

    Those in the group would also undergo “direct active monitoring,” in which a medical worker watches as the person’s temperature is taken and speaks with him regularly about his condition.

    So it sounds like the DWB doctor who was admitted to Bellevue probably should not have taken the subway to the hospital. Certainly his mere presence in the subway (or the bowling alley) was not a risk but if he were to have become injured in some way, his bodily fluids carried the disease.

  9. JanF

    U.N. Ambassador Goes To Sierra Leone For Closer Look At Ebola Crisis

    Samantha Power, who arrived in the capital Freetown after visiting neighboring Guinea, has said Washington wants to help the region fight the deadly virus.

    “We are in this with you for the long haul,” she said Sunday after meeting with religious leaders in Guinea, where the epidemic has killed nearly 5,000 people. “We have got to overcome the fear and the stigma that are associated with Ebola.”

  11. JanF

    Emory Hospital Shares Lessons Learned On Ebola Care

    Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital got the first call at the end of July. An American doctor who’d been treating Ebola in Liberia was now terribly sick with the virus himself. In just 72 hours, Dr. Kent Brantly would be coming through Emory’s doors. Then, almost immediately, the staff learned that a second Ebola patient was also on the way. Dr. Jay Varkey’s first thought was, “What do we need today, in order to care for these patients tomorrow?”

    In the three months since, Emory has treated four Ebola patients; all survived. Most recently, Dallas nurse Amber Vinson spent more than a week in a special treatment unit at Emory before being discharged in restored health and good spirits Tuesday.

    “The general dogma in our industry in July was that if patients got so ill they required dialysis or ventilator support, there was no purpose in doing those interventions because they would invariably die,” Dr. Bruce Ribner, who heads Emory’s Ebola team, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday. Emory, he said, proved instead that aggressively treating the illness can be effective.

    Emory started 12 months ago to set up a unit for treatment, in conjunction with the CDC and now has, literally, written the book on care:

    The Emory team doesn’t claim to have all the right answers, Varkey says. But what they do know, they’re sharing.

    “Our entire 84-page document, in terms of our protocols,” he says, “is now available to any person who wants to access that on the web.”

    Those protocols went live a week ago. So far, more than 11,300 people have registered to get access to them.

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