President Obama challenged the public Tuesday to focus on the fight against Ebola at its source in West Africa, praising health care workers doing “God’s work over there” as conflicting state and federal guidelines produce cracks in the response to potential outbreaks at home.
Mr. Obama’s comments, delivered before he jetted to a campaign event in Wisconsin, seemed part of a concerted strategy to tamp down Americans’ fears amid the state-by-state response to the deadly virus within U.S. borders, while raising up those willing to fight the disease in difficult conditions abroad.
Critics say the Obama administration is playing catch-up while states enforce their own quarantine rules, although the White House says states have the authority to enforce public health measures. Without naming anyone, Mr. Obama hinted that strict isolation policies will dissuade health workers from joining the fight in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
“We don’t want to discourage our health care workers from going to the front lines and dealing with this in an effective way,” he said.
Hours earlier, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had said he will not back down from a 21-day quarantine rule for travelers who were exposed to Ebola patients.
Mr. Obama spoke on Ebola after a phone call with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) volunteers who are working in Africa to contain the virus, which has killed nearly 5,000 people there.
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“It’s typical of what America does best,” he said. “When others are in trouble — when disease or disaster strikes, Americans help, and no other nation is doing as much to make sure that we contain and ultimately eliminate this outbreak than America.”
The president has committed up to 3,000 troops to the fight against Ebola in West Africa. Already, at a least a dozen troops have been isolated at a base in Italy, even as administration officials say similar moves within the U.S. could dissuade health care workers.
“The military is in a different situation,” Mr. Obama said, in having been assigned to their post rather than volunteering to go.
The president stressed that only two people have contracted Ebola within the U.S., and both were cured.
One of them, 29-year-old nurse Amber Vinson, was released from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. She tested positive for the virus after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian who came to the U.S. last month and then died from Ebola, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.
Her colleague, 26-year-old Nina Pham, was released from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda last week.
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In a teary-eyed press conference, Ms. Vinson thanked God and asked the public to keep their focus on families “who continue to labor under the disease in West Africa.”
Bruce Ribner, medical director of the serious communicable diseases unit at Emory University Hospital, said Ms. Vinson can return to her community without any problems, and that leaders should balance the public’s concerns about Ebola with best practices based on science.
That balance has been tested in New Jersey, where Mr. Christie staunchly defended his quarantine policy Tuesday — one day after he allowed a nurse to return to Maine because she was symptom-free for 24 hours.
Kaci Hickox, 33, complained about her isolation in a hospital tent in Newark over the weekend. The nurse had worked with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone and registered a fever at the nearby airport, yet she thinks the instrument was faulty.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a risk scale Monday to guide state officials in their response to returning health workers or others with potential exposure to Ebola. The federal guidelines do not go as far as restrictions put in place by more and more states.
But Mr. Christie said the CDC has been slow to respond to Ebola. “Folks got infected in Texas because they were behind,” he said. “We’re not going to have folks being infected in New Jersey and other states in this country.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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