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Clearing out my tabs, Part 1:

Corey Gardner is up by 7 points over Mark Uterus, per this Suffolk poll.

Hillary Clinton says "Don't let anybody tell you that businesses and corporations create jobs."

Um, who then? Only the federal government, I suppose?

An Open Letter to Ben Affleck, from a young Muslim girl who wants to know why Affleck is covering up for the people who are hurting her.

Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo implicitly say "F*** the CDC" by imposing more stringent protocols than the late-acting agency recommends.

The National Institute for Health have wasted millions upon millions of dollars on silly studies while crying that they don't have enough money to fund their core mission.

A possible reason is suggested by Heather MacDonald, who notes:

The public-health establishment has unanimously opposed a travel and visa moratorium from Ebola-plagued West African countries to protect the U.S. population. To evaluate whether this opposition rests on purely scientific grounds, it helps to understand the political character of the public-health field. For the last several decades, the profession has been awash in social-justice ideology. Many of its members view racism, sexism, and economic inequality, rather than individual behavior, as the primary drivers of differential health outcomes in the U.S. According to mainstream public-health thinking, publicizing the behavioral choices behind bad health--promiscuous sex, drug use, overeating, or lack of exercise--blames the victim.

We should not be surprised, then, that the NIH spends so much of the taxpayer dollars on studies of obese lesbians and sexual habits of gay men in Peru. (Yes, Peru.)

At Bellevue hospital -- which is treating Craig Spencer, the ebola-stricken doc -- staffers are calling in "sick" because they don't want to come into contact with the patient.

This is a very real problem caused by the CDC's lackadaisical negligence from the start. We are now fighting a war against plague on our own shores. Our doctors and nurses are the soldiers in that war -- they are most likely to be killed fighting it.

If you give your soldiers a series of flawed protocols and inadequate training, and just insist when they get sick that it's all their fault, what do you think your soldiers are going to do?

Besides the issue of proper protective gear protocols, what else went wrong in the Dallas case?

I don’t think we've really done well by our health care workers. When the first nurse in Texas got sick, the statement was, "There was a breach in protocol but we don’t know what the breach was." How do you know there was a breach in protocol and that the protocol isn't bad? Then we moved on to the nurse that got on the plane. She had the okay from the CDC to fly, but the statement was, "She shouldn’t have gotten on the plane."

So I'm getting concerned that we're now not only asking health care workers to assume the risk of getting sick but also to assume the risk of getting blamed for getting sick and getting blamed for exposing others, even when they're following guidelines. If this is how we're treating our health care workers, who's going to want to take care of Ebola patients?

You need to create an environment where staff feel supported by their institutions.

Actions have consequences. Incompetency has consequences. Not taking sufficient precautions to make sure your soldiers have a fighting chance has consequences.

I don't even want to speculate what nurses' reactions will be if anyone at Bellevue now gets sick.

When you are dealing with something serious, your response must be serious. If your response is unserious, your problems are going to become even more serious.

Open thread for like whatever.

posted by Ace at 12:26 PM

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