By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 24, 2014
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Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday urged residents not to be alarmed by the doctor's Ebola diagnosis, even as they described him riding the subway, taking a cab and bowling. De Blasio said all city officials followed "clear and strong" protocols in their handling and treatment of him. "We want to state at the outset that New Yorkers have no reason to be alarmed," de Blasio said. "New Yorkers who have not been exposed are not at all at risk." Health officials say the chances of the average New Yorker contracting Ebola, which is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, are slim. Someone can't be infected just by being near someone who is sick with Ebola. Someone isn't contagious unless he is sick.So good of Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio to urge that we all remain calm, but I think we are. What's bothering lefties is not "panic" so much as their attention on the fact that the Obama Administration has once again talked a good game about having a handle on the situation when in fact it has no such thing. This is what's motivating the likes of Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post to condescendingly tell the rest of us to abandon the thoughts we are not even thinking:
If you are worried about contracting Ebola, I have two suggestions. First, stop. Second, get a flu shot. On the first: If you live in the United States, your chances of getting Ebola are vanishingly small — even if you are a health-care worker, or a journalist who travels to Africa to report on the epidemic. That is not to diminish the significance of the problem. For Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the virus represents a public health catastrophe, one with dire implications for the continent and beyond.Got that? You are not to worry. You are to go get a flu shot now. But Ruth Marcus is free to toss around words like "epidemic" and warn of "dire implications for the continent and beyond." But don't worry you rubes! Then there's Frank Bruni in the New York Times:
We Americans do panic really well. We could use a few pointers on prudence. Do me a favor. Turn away from the ceaseless media coverage of Ebola in Texas — the interviews with the Dallas nurse’s neighbors, the hand-wringing over her pooch, the instructions on protective medical gear — and answer this: Have you had your flu shot? Are you planning on one? During the 2013-2014 flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza, even though it kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year, nearly 50,000 in a bad one. These are deaths by a familiar assassin. Many of them could have been prevented. So why aren’t we in a lather over that? Why fixate on remote threats that we feel we can’t control when there are immediate ones that we simply don’t bother to?See? All you commoners are "in a lather" as you "do panic" over Ebola, while the wise New York Times columnists urges "prudence" and, of course, chastises you for not being a good and proper citizen and getting your flu shot like the respectable authorities instruct. Liberal commentators all across the country have been taking their lead for the last couple of weeks, and now politicians are falling right in. These people are so obnoxious. To read what they write is to read of a world that exists entirely in their imaginations - one in which people are running in the streets in full-scale panic while the wise and schooled elite media wag their fingers and admonish the masses to follow the instructions of the official officials. In the real world, normal people are going about their normal lives, refusing to be baited by the hysteria fomented by the media, and recognizing that it would be foolhardy to trust public officials to be on top of the problem because they are every bit as inept as the elite commentators who want so desperately to believe that they walk among the best and brightest in society. So calm down and stop panicking everyone! Get your flu shot! There is no reason to be upset and we're at our wit's end with you for not listening to us! NOW WE'RE REALLY MAD! Jerks.
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