Only competence can fight panic
David Strom, The Daily Record Newswire
The news stories, commentaries, and pronouncements from politicians and government officials about the Ebola virus’s emergence in America have been very odd.
Most of what we hear seems to be a variation upon a theme: Don’t panic.
From what I can tell, nobody outside a few kooks who are always panicking about something or another is.
What Americans are, instead, is increasingly concerned. And a disturbing amount of that concern isn’t driven by fear that they themselves will get the virus, but rather that the people we have put in charge of dealing with this serious possibility simply aren’t up to the job of doing so.
They are, unfortunately, right to be concerned. Nobody has covered himself in glory so far.
The CDC deserves most of the blame for a growing crisis in confidence. Ever since 9/11, the CDC has been awash in money to deal with unusual public health threats. The further we have gotten from 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, the less new money has been flowing into their coffers, but the fact is that they are much better funded today than before the anthrax attacks.
Unfortunately, despite lots of warning, they simply weren’t prepared for Ebola to reach American shores. Their guidance to hospitals for how to deal with the disease has been roundly criticized as woefully inadequate. The CDC has implicitly admitted this by drastically revising their recommendations.
The CDC also gave the green light to the Texas nurse who later developed Ebola to fly on a commercial aircraft. Many people argue she should have known herself to not fly, but that doesn’t cut it in my book. The CDC employs the undisputed experts, and if they certified her as safe to fly, they failed miserably.
Until these failures came to light, the CDC was one of the few federal agencies people still trusted to be competent. I certainly trusted and admired them, and would and did implicitly put my life into their hands.
Now I am among the many Americans who have lost faith in the CDC in just the past few weeks and see them more as a bloated and inept government agency than a crack group of experts on top of things. (A CBS poll this month showed a 23 percent drop in the public’s approval of the agency, to 37 percent.)
This is a serious problem. Dealing with infectious diseases is among the relatively few functions of government that almost nobody disputes. We empower the government to violate civil liberties with quarantines, warrantless entries and searches, and other similar measures because the Constitution is not a suicide pact. In exchange, we expect the fight against diseases to be competent and do as much as is necessary and no more.
The CDC’s fall from grace is important for many reasons — not the least of which is that Americans are not nearly as protected from infectious diseases as we had been led to believe. The longer-term problem is that the CDC was seen by many of us as a rare example of what government could and should do well. Now it is just another overly expensive government agency that demands respect that it hasn’t earned.
And that is the point of the “don’t panic” exhortations that is so annoying. Americans aren’t panicking — we’re worried that nobody knows what they are doing about the most important things. Government demands that we trust it to take over our health insurance, and it screws up badly. Government demands that we trust it with educating our children, and they consistently underperform. Government demands that we trust it with 40 percent of our income, and it squanders much of it.
Americans are losing faith, and that is a serious problem.
In the 20th century Americans were known as a “can do” nation. We turned back tyranny in Europe twice — in wars far shorter than Iraq and Afghanistan. We defeated polio, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, and other countless bacterial infections that regularly killed Americans. We mobilized and accomplished things.
Now, government can’t even publish a website.
Americans are right to be concerned, and right to push back when government recommendations don’t mesh with common sense, as with forgoing travel restrictions.
In the past we might have trusted the advice of “experts,” even when that advice didn’t mesh with our own instincts. Today, though, we just don’t trust the experts any more. And in that, we are all too often right.
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David Strom is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment.
