RUSH: Even as I speak, there is a discussion on CNN right now that the US Ebola patient didn’t have to die. Apparently they’re discussing a column written by somebody (I don’t know who; they haven’t named him that I’ve seen) who claims that we let Thomas Duncan die because he’s black (i.e., we’re racist) and because he was poor and because he was from Africa and because we didn’t care. Never mind the fact…
You know, something that’s not getting mention in all this? There is also a story about the NBC cameraman being treated for Ebola in Kansas. For all this talk about — and it’s out there. I’m sure that if you watch CNN, you’ve heard it. This is not the first time they have brought up the subject here. I don’t think people are stopping to take the time to reflect on the doctors and nurses that are coming in close contact with these patients to treat them.
Given all the news that’s out there about this disease, the death rate anywhere 50 to 90%, something like 7,500 cases worldwide, 3,500 deaths. So the death rate appears to be in the black of 50%, and yet an Ebola patient shows up — or even a suspected Ebola patient shows up — and the people in the hospital do not run away. They hang in there, and they won’t be their best to protect themselves and they treat these people.
For all this talk about all the racism and bigotry, and how this guy didn’t get treated soon enough and the hospital sent him away, when he ended up coming back, he was attended to by people that come in close proximity. They’re trained medical professionals, I understand that, but those people, in Africa, have died. Doctors in Africa have died treating patients.
People who thought they were taking precautions — people that had been fully deck the out in full hazmat gear — have died. I think there’s a lot being taken for granted here, particularly in the news media report throwing around here that there’s racism to explain why this Ebola patient died. It’s not as though he walked into the hospital and everybody left and said, “You’re on your own, Buddy!”
He was treated, eventually, and the NBC cameraman’s being treated in Nebraska, and there are people within close proximity. There are people taking risks knowing what we know to treat the sick, and I think it’s outrageous to hear pepole bandying about this typical left-wing drivel and bilge that this country is filled with racists and bigots who don’t care if certain people get sick and die.
Some columnist in the Dallas Morning News says Thomas Duncan did not have to die. Claims be wasn’t turned away, he would have been treated soon enough and would have lived, which is pure speculation! Nobody knows. I mean, we didn’t have any serum to give the guy. We’d given it all away to Africa. He got an experimental drug. He was treated twice by that Dallas hospital.
The first time, he got the wrong treatment, but he was treated. I mean, Thomas Duncan died because he didn’t tell the doctors the truth from front to back, nor did his family. But just, folks, the next time that you hear this being bandied about by your typical left-wing media type who just can’t wait to rip into this country, just remember the next picture you see of medical personnel treating Ebola patients, up close and personal.
That’s how you just put to rest this baseless charge.
Now, the French News Agency is reporting: “The deadly spread of Ebola in West Africa is something unseen since the outbreak of AIDS, Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday. ‘I would say that in the 30 years I’ve been working in public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS,’ he told a top-level Ebola forum in Washington.
“‘It’s going to be a long fight,’ he told [the usual suspects from] the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund gathered in Washington. ‘We have to work now so that it is not the world’s next AIDS.'” I don’t know. This could be bigger than that, if — and that’s the thing. You don’t know what to believe, because there’s seemingly so many contradictory things being said about how you contract it.
“You’re not gonna contract it. It’s hard to get.”
“No, it’s not! It’s easy to get!”
But what in the world…? Of all people dying, why is the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and a bunch of doofuses at the United Nations there? What in the world do they have to do with stopping the spread of this? What’s the World Bank do that I don’t know? What’s the IMF do that I don’t know? These are money people. I know, I know. Follow the money; you get to the answer to everything.
“Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell said that despite the best efforts of health officials, Americans have to prepare for the reality that there may be more cases of Ebola in the United States.” Wait! No! No! We were told that we handle on it. no. Didn’t the president say that? Didn’t he say that Ebola was not gonna get here, and that there was no reason to worry about this?
When we flew those first those chair those missionary workers back and thereby brought people with the disease back into the country, that’s when he said, “Don’t worry about it,” and now his own Health and Human Services secretary says, “Well, you have to prepare for reality. There may be more cases.” She was “at a media breakfast hosted by the journal Health Affairs and held at the Washington, DC, offices of the Kaiser Family Foundation.”
I don’t know if anybody from the IMF, the World Bank, or the UN was there.
She said, “We had one case and I think there may be other cases, and I think we have to recognize that as a nation.” Her “comments come as screening of travelers from Ebola-affected countries in West Africa has been stepped up at U.S. airports. On Wednesday, the first patient diagnosed with the virus on US soil died in Texas. She expressed confidence in the screening process that has already been in place in travelers’ departure cities, but acknowledged that no such system is 100%.”
Then from the UK-based international market polling firm called YouGov… You’ve heard of them, YouGov.com, polls and so forth. They’ve got a story: “As Ebola Comes to the US, Concern Rises.” This is a poll taken from YouGov and The Economist magazine. This poll proves just how racist the US is.
You see, in a nutshell, this poll claims that Americans only began to care about Ebola once it hit the US, not when it was ravaging western Africa. We couldn’t have cared less when it was only in Africa. The most appalling result is reported the bottom of the article. The poll found that 62% of Americans think, quote, “more would have been done” to combat Ebola if it had not originated in West Africa.
Worse still, 95% of black Americans believe there would already be a cure for Ebola if it had originated in America or Europe.
This is the economist, YouGov. This is a poll as we were discussing in the first hour. CBS suppressed their poll of bad news on Obama and the Democrats. It’s a classic what polling has become. It’s a news story. A poll is a news story. And since it’s a news story, see, it proves the truth. We’re a bunch of racists and the race-baiters have won. Yeah, we didn’t care about this. We don’t care about any world. We don’t care about ourselves. All we care about is ourselves. When it was in West Africa, nobody here cared. And if it had been first discovered in Europe or America there would already be a cure. The white people would have taken care of themselves. That’s what this poll claims to say a majority of Americans believe.
See what racists we are? “Forty percent of African-Americans say they are very concerned about the possibility of an epidemic here.” It’s confusing when you get down to it. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. We’ve got Dr. Frieden here, and this is at the World Bank Forum. We just quoted him, but I want you to hear him. The World Bank Forum on the Ebola outbreak, attended by members of the Star Wars cantina from the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, Dr. Thomas Frieden.
FRIEDEN: I will say that in the 30 years I’ve been working in public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS. And we have to work now so that this is not the world’s next AIDS.
RUSH: Now, he’s on the verge here of declaring that this is the world’s next AIDS. We’ve gotta do everything we can. It could be as bad. It’s horrible. Remember that as context for the next bite, which is from yesterday afternoon in Atlanta at the CDC. Dr. Frieden held a press conference on the Ebola outbreak and a question he got from a reporter during the Q&A. “There’s some critics out there, Doctor, who are saying that even with these enhanced efforts, that people are gonna fall through the seams, gonna fall through the cracks, and that your efforts won’t be enough. People are still gonna get in the country. Will these efforts be enough to protect the country, to protect other people from Ebola?”
FRIEDEN: As long as Ebola continues to spread in Africa, we can’t make the risk zero here. We wish we could. We wish there were some way that they could make it zero here, and I understand there have been calls to ban all travel to West Africa. The problem with that approach is that it makes it extremely difficult to respond to the outbreak. It makes it hard to get health workers in because they can’t get out. If we make it harder to response to the outbreak in West Africa, it will spread not only in those three countries, but to other parts of Africa and will ultimately increase the risk here. That’s why the concept of “above all, doing no harm” is so important here.
RUSH: I don’t know, folks. Look, I have no doubt, by the way, that this guy is trying. I am not gonna impugn this guy’s motives, but I think what we have here is a typical intellectual theoretician. He lives in a in a philosophical theoretical world not really attached to reality. The reality is the theoretical, the what-if, the maybe, rather than the what is. Why couldn’t we have special flights for aid workers? Why can’t we charter one of those jets that we brought the people home and have those go in and out and still shut down general public air travel? What is this you can’t get the aid workers in because then we couldn’t get ’em out if we banned travel? That’s just absurd.
Look, as I say, I don’t want to impugn the guy’s motives. I think the guy’s trying and he may be a fine scientist, but I don’t know that he’s equipped here, either… (interruption) Well, here’s the problem he’s got. Nobody in this administration can even come close to addressing the concept of tightening the border, much less close it. You can’t because over here your president wants amnesty this year by executive order. If you’re in this Regime you can’t say or do anything that would raise the support level for shutting the border.
So in order to stay away from that, you have to delve into inanities. You have to say, “Well, what we have to do is to contain this in Africa. But containing it in Africa is mean.” That’s what he’s saying, Mr. Snerdley. Snerdley is trying to figure out, “What did this guy just say?” What he’s saying is our only hope is to contain it in Africa, but by doing that we’re being racist or judgmental or mean-spirited or whatever. We can’t just contain it in Africa, although that’s what we have to do, but just keeping it in Africa is unfair to them.
The guy’s got shackles on him that are labeled political correctness. He’s trying his best with the restraints or constraints that have been imposed on him by virtue of what he’s been taught. I mean, he thinks it’s mean to contain a disease where it is. It’s mean to the people to whom you’re containing it. It isn’t fair. It’s not fair that they have it and other people don’t. And so shutting down the country, that’s not fair, although that’s what we should do, but we can’t.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It might be helpful, ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to know where Thomas Frieden came from, the director of the Centers for Disease Control. Did he come from the Joycelyn Elders school, for example, where she wanted to teach masturbation in all the public schools. Or does he come from the C. Everett Koop school? He was the Surgeon General.
Well, here’s who Dr. Thomas Frieden is. He was the health commissioner for Mayor Bloomberg in New York City. And Dr. Thomas Frieden, as the health commissioner in New York for Mayor Bloomberg worked with Bloomberg to increase tobacco taxes. He was right there banning smoking from workplaces, including restaurants and bars. Now, it’s too bad that Dr. Frieden won’t allow us to crack down on Ebola as hard as he’s cracked down on cigarettes.
But I was talking yesterday, AIDS was the first virus to ever have privacy rights. It was the first virus to have civil rights. And Ebola may not be far behind because the same guy who was willing to ban smoking from workplaces and enforce it to the max, send people in to find people smoking and fine ’em, first offense, and worse after that. He was the smoking nanny. He was the smoking nanny for Mayor Bloomberg. He worked with Bloomberg to raise tobacco taxes and ban smoking from the workplace. He succeeded.
This is the point. Dr. Thomas Frieden succeeded, along with Mayor Bloomberg, in banning cigarette smoking in an entire city, the largest city in the country. But the same guy says you can’t stop people from flying into the country from an Ebola country. Now, the last I checked, you don’t need a visa to smoke. You do need a visa to get into the country. Frieden did not think it was mean to contain cigarette smoking in New York City. He thought that was responsible. Cigarette smoking is not proven to kill everybody who does it. We can’t even calculate a smoking death rate, actually. There’s no way of actually doing it. And even at that, smoking takes decades to make people sick.
Not Ebola. So here’s a guy who had no problem stigmatizing smokers. Here’s a guy who had no problem banning them to the outer reaches of society because they smoked the evil tobacco weed. But with Ebola, well, you know, there’s nothing really. It’s bad, but, you know, it’s just not fair, just can’t do it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, in addition to the smoking ban and stigmatizing smokers as the filthiest, deadliest people in the city of New York, Dr. Thomas Frieden, who now runs the Centers for Disease Control, was the man behind the banning of trans fats in restaurants in New York City. His health department also required chain restaurants to post calorie information to raise consumer awareness of the caloric impact of fast food. That’s who this guy is. You were asking me, “What is he saying?” This is who the guy is.
Smokers are public enemy number one, and we will banish them and their activity to the far reaches of our society. And we’ll do it with smiles, and we’ll do it with punishment in mind. It takes decades to kill from smoking and there is no secondhand smoke death risk. That’s another suppressed survey. The United Nations, the World Health Organization, they did research and they found it and they suppressed it. They did not report it, but we got the cached file from the website way back in the nineties. They studied it in country after country after, secondhand smoke might make people uncomfortable, but there’s no illness attached to it. It’s a big myth. Anyway, that’s who the guy is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Kyle in Sun City, Arizona. Hi, Kyle. I’m glad you waited. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thanks much.
CALLER: Hey, do you remember back — I believe it was 2009 — when we had that H1N1 flu pandemic sweeping across Central America?
RUSH: What is H1? Is that a bird flu?
CALLER: Yeah, that was the flu virus.
RUSH: Flu virus, flu virus, H1. Yeah, vaguely I do, 2009, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, we had Kathleen Sebelius.
RUSH: Oh, yeah! Oh! Oh!
CALLER: She was out there doing those news conferences and sneezing into her sleeve.
RUSH: Now I remember, yes! She was everywhere. Oh, yeah. Oh, now I remember. Yes, yes, yes.
CALLER: Yes, we had all that fearmongering from the administration then, and then we had Joe Biden. He did an interview where he said he would not allow his family to travel in enclosed spaces, i.e., like an airplane. So what’s different now?
RUSH: What has Joe Biden said about Ebola?
CALLER: Well, my question is, he wouldn’t allow his family then to fly in an airplane.
RUSH: Yeah, I know. I know. But it’s Biden. I mean, he was undercutting his… I have Sebelius in my mind, and there was fear. I mean, they were really trying to raise — I’ll call it consciousness raising rather than fearmongering. They were trying to raise that and they’re pushing the vaccine, right? I don’t remember Biden. He always gets in on the act. He tries to put the exclamation point on everything, and ends up putting his foot in his mouth. So I get your point. It is, if the H1 virus, which didn’t amount to anything, was enough to keep Biden and his family out of enclosed places like an airplane cabin…?
CALLER: Of course, now they’re telling us there’s nothing to worry about.
RUSH: Yeah, if you don’t see any symptoms. Nothing at all to worry about if you don’t see any symptoms. If you don’t see any symptoms, it’s impossible for the disease to spread — they think. No, I get your point. These contradictions in the way things are being dealt with, they really are stark. But I tell you, do you know what my favorite one is that we’ve learned today? I’m serious.
Here this guy at the CDC, this Frieden guy — who will not go out of his way to ban anybody with Ebola getting into this country — was the guy in New York who sends cigarette smokers as far away from the mainstream as he could get ’em. He banned smoking everywhere in public, in ballparks, in parks, because smoking kills? It may take 30 years to kill you, but it supposedly kills. Smoking? That’s the guy running the CDC? There’s no way cigarette smoking is anywhere near as life-threatening as this is, and he’s treating it in an entirely different manner.