Political Correctness Uber Alles

Americans have long been in the clutch of the despotic hand of political correctness. It has been our country’s civil religion as long as I can remember. It mostly serves as a minor nuisance in everyday life. It exist just enough to control our thoughts and speech, to be an overseer of our behavior and obstruct our natural view the world around us. However, it has even made its way into actual policy decisions and laws, especially under Obama & Holder Inc. For starters, consider immigration. Only a country so removed from reality would allow its borders and laws to be violated the way the US has. 

Once across our border, uninvited and unwanted, illegal immigrants find refuge and welfare relief from many state and city governments. Free from arrest, and least of all, deportation. The goodwill and charity comes, not from private hospitably of citizens but from the aid of government at taxpayer’s expense. Any negative reaction, and there is plenty, is ignored and shamed. Ugly labels are used as duct tape over the mouths of the average citizen. Silenced, pummeled, and threatened back into their living rooms and told to be good consumer peasants. Meanwhile, the “political” debate on immigration is anything but. Instead, it’s an issue that is talked around carefully when it front of cameras, and rather candidly behind doors. More illegal immigration is one of the only issues where both sides tend to agree. 

This is startling considering that Americans routinely poll between 60 and 70 percent in favor of curbing or ending immigration, as well as sending those back to the country of their origin who willfully and knowingly violated our laws. 

Why has nothing happened under the force of a clear majority? The clergy and holy priests who occupy the seats in our town halls, federal bureaucracies, universities, nonprofits, courts and Congress do not answer to the people. Instead they adhere to their dogma. It is better to practice the teachings of political correctness, in the holy name of diversity, then to obey men. 

Our federal government is the secular version of the Vatican. 

And so now we have a more immediate, pandemic threat in which political correctness was very much a factor. Ebola is a disease so foreign and far away from our shores that most Americans know nothing about it. That was until a man named Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian, who brought it to the United States and infected a yet unknown number. He was allowed to board an airplane in Liberia and fly to America despite the risks to public safety.

A country secure in its identity and unanimous in its beliefs would unhesitatingly take any and all actions and precautions to ensure the public safety of its citizens. We do not, unfortunately, live in such a country. Discussions of travel bans by federal officials and liberal pundits are dismissed as if time travel is being proposed instead of simply ending flights in and out of Ebola ridden areas of the world.

As Patrick J. Buchanan wrote, “The Greatest Generation possessed a common sense that seems lacking today.”

In dealing with contagious and deadly diseases, common sense says to err on the side of safety. Public safety must come before political correctness. Community and country come ahead of any obligation to the people of West Africa.

Indeed, is not the first duty of the government of the United States to protect the lives, liberty and property of the citizens of the United States?

Traveling to Africa decades ago, Americans were given a series of shots to avoid contracting indigenous diseases. Travelers to the United States were questioned about diseases to which they may have been exposed in Third World countries.

Now we have a government that considers it discriminatory to put troops on our frontiers to halt the invading millions from across the Mexican border, and the mark of a cruel and cold people to send back lawbreakers who have broken into our country.

All great religions need their martyrs. But rarely has there been a time when the zealotry of so few endangered the lives of so many.

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Ebola is the October Surprise

“The situation with Ebola and what’s going on in Syria and Iraq — all of this is creating a high level of anxiety among voters and a sense of uncertainty about the future,” said Democratic strategist Doug Thornell.

You don’t say. Yes Ebola and the typical head-in-the-sand take on the consequences of the spread of the virus are playing as strong factors headed into the midterm elections. Americans are worried, sure, but disgusted is a better description. It is almost as if we anticipated the eventual and inevitable spread of Ebola to the US. I mean who but our politicians, and what but our government, is better equipped to inflict an unmitigated disaster on their countrymen?

The lethal virus carried willy-nilly by a man from West Africa, who jetted his way to the US, on an international flight from the Ebola cradle, sick of course with the virus, landed on US soil like a dirty bomb and died in Dallas, Texas. However, not before he infected, now two hospital workers, before he died. Assuredly, there will be more to follow.  

A Liberian Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and the nurses treating him worked for days without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released late Tuesday by the largest U.S. nurses’ union.

Nurses were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments, worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting, said Deborah Burger of National Nurses United.

This is insanity. An outrage our political class has inflicted upon Americans. In the name of inclusion and diversity, not the slightest scrutiny was given to passengers from Ebola infected countries. The thought of a travel ban, even the mere discussion of it, is sacrilegious to dumb-headed multiculturalists. 

Dr. Tom Frieden: If we isolate these countries, what’s not going to happen is the disease staying there. It will spread more, all over Africa and we’ll be at higher risk.

This makes no damn sense whatsoever. So in the name of inclusion and diversity we must ensure “It will spread more, all over America so that we’ll be at higher risk?”

These types of people are in charge of our country and somebody has to pay for it. Short of taking up arms and forcibly cleaning out Washington, Americans will use the only legal means at their disposal.

Like a man frantically running from one side of the boat to the other just before it capsizes, voters will frantically run to Republicans. Not realizing jumping ship and braving the sharks is a better alternative. 

Nonetheless, voters will punish the Democrats and President Obama for this disaster.

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Liberal Desperation: Agenda Project Action Fund blames Republicans for EBOLA crisis because of budget cuts.

Yesterday I highlighted an interview with Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institute for Health, and the Huffington Post. In this interview Dr. Collins declared that the reason the United States does not have an ebola vaccine or treatment was due to budget cuts. However, some research provided a little bit of  a different story. Now it seems that a liberal PAC has created an ad that lays the blame for Ebola solely at the feet of the GOP. Now there are many things you could honestly blame the GOP for, however, Ebola and the results of the horrible disease are not one of them. 

The rest of the one-minute ad is peppered with clips of Republicans asking for cuts, interspersed with top officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health saying the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could have been better handled if their agencies had more funding. NIH head Francis Collins said in an interview published Sunday that an Ebola vaccine might have been developed by now if it were not for a “10-year slide in research support.”
Erica Payne, the producer of the ad and president of the Agenda Project Action Fund, blamed the Ebola crisis wholly on the Republican Party.
“I think any Republican who attempts to chalk this ad up to politics is a Republican who is too afraid to examine the results of his of her actions and the very real consequences that they have,” she said. “They have developed a governing philosophy that is so fanatically anti-investment that they literally have at their doorstop death. There is no exaggeration in this.
“I think that the blame for the situation that we’re in now with the Ebola crisis is 100% the fault of Republicans and their fanatical anti-government philosophy,” she added. “They did this.”

This political scare-mongering reminded me of the video in which a mock Paul Ryan was shown pushing "grandma" off of a cliff in her wheelchair back in  2012. The Ryan video was also brought to us by the Agenda Project Action Fund (APAF), the creators of the abovementioned Ebola video. It seems the slime merchants over at the APAF have a penchant for attempting to cash in on the fear which is currently gripping the national consciousness.

Another point of interest is that this video is now garnering some attention around the same time Dr. Collins is out on the stump in interview after interview, blaming budget cuts for the NIH, more specifically NIAID, for the lack of an EBOLA treatment.  This to a skeptical mind might smack of political coordination and back room dealing to get attention off of the real problem. The inefficient way in which TEN different government organizations deal with the development and manufacturing of treatments for infectious diseases!

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Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director: "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

In an interview with Huffington Post, Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director, has stated "that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases."

The HuffPo article goes on,

Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH's purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency's budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion -- barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013. 

Upon further investigation of the National Institute of Health's Office of Budget historical data, reveals that the what is being reported by the HuffPo, or to a point the opinion stated by Dr. Collins, doesn't represent the totality of the facts. The graphics below should provide a clearer picture.

(click on image to enlarge)

For example, the amount of money appropriated to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),  taken from the image above, shows a relatively consistent and increasing amount of appropriations fiscal year to fiscal year.

As you can see from 2002-03 annual funding increased around $1.4 bn and then from 2003-04 roughly another $600 million. From 2005-07 was where there was relative "stagnation" in budgetary appropriations. Additionally, the infamous budget cuts, presumably a result of sequestration, can be seen beginning in 2011 and continuing until 2013. Furthermore, the total amount of expenditures from 2003-13 by NIAID has been a resounding $44.3 bn.  But...despite the bleating about stagnation and cuts in appropriations there seems to be another set of problems that may be the genesis of the government's inability to provide the proper viral and bacterial countermeasures required in the event of pandemics. This has less to do with money and more with red tape, contracting blunders, and unnecessary bureaucratic redundancy.

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek,

In the 1990s, after revelations of the Soviet biological and chemical weapons programs and the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, the U.S. handed its defensive drugmaking to the Pentagon. After 2001, the Pentagon budget for biological and chemical defense rose from $880 million to $1.12 billion. Since then, roughly a third of its total budget, about $3.9 billion, has been designated for a list of “biological threat agents.” The list is classified, but it now numbers 18, according to a 2014 analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Ebola is almost certainly on this list and likely near the top. The Soviet Union had an Ebola program, and Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that released the sarin gas in Tokyo, sent doctors in 1993 to what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo on an unsuccessful mission to get an Ebola sample.

Then, because the 2001 anthrax attacks on the Capitol in Washington were directed at civilians, the Department of Health and Human Services launched a parallel track in biochemical defense. Soon, the HHS began keeping its own list of biological threats. Over the next two years, the budget at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the HHS, jumped from $2.04 billion to $3.7 billion. Two separate arms of the federal government, with a $5 billion annual budget between them, now were focused on the same set of problems but not talking to each other well. And neither was accomplishing what was needed most: producing drugs.

By 2006 the White House became aware of an inefficiency. NIAID’s budget went to sponsor basic research at university and commercial labs, but the agency didn’t move its ideas out of the lab, into trials, and through the FDA approval process. The Pentagon’s program also “never got enough money to be a pharmaceutical company,” says Robert Kadlec. A consultant and public health physician who held several high-level posts in biodefense in the George W. Bush administration, Kadlec says the Pentagon had “enough for research and development, but not for licensure.”

 Below is a graphic provided by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, illustrating all of the bureaucratic agencies which  have a stake in serums, vaccines or treatments that relate to "biological and chemical defense."

The presentation describes the agency’s work as it was in 2011. Too much effort was wasted on “knowledge products,” or basic science. Unpromising projects weren’t killed and continued to waste money. Drug development was managed around yearly budgets rather than end goals. Efficacy studies, which determine whether drugs work on animals, weren’t complete, nor were safety studies, which test whether a drug is OK for human use. Samples of Ebola were found in a freezer in a containment lab without patient histories, control samples, or even validation that they contained the virus. The samples were safe but useless for drug development.

None of this is meant to impugn Dr Collins, the good work being done at the NIH by any of the virologists, epidemiologists, and other accompanying scientists, or any of the other involved agencies. However, it can be interpreted that the claims about budgetary shortfalls being the fundamental cause  for the lack of development of an EBOLA vaccine appear to be rather myopic and disingenuous. Perhaps another look at our structure for development and manufacturing of drugs is at hand. Rather than trying to fill a bottomless pit with greenbacks, with prospect on return being the status quo, maybe some thought can be given to streamlining these processes and eliminating the unnecessary redundancy.

More over at memeorandum.

Related:

Hot Air
The Daily Caller
The American Spectator

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