The outrage over diseased West Africans seems to have died out with Thomas Eric Duncan; we now concentrate our indignation on American healthcare workers, those infected both here and abroad.  Given that the mortality rate of Ebola victims in West Africa is nearly 80%, Doctors Without Borders is providing care that is little more than palliative.  Is it worthwhile, then, that these NGOs transform our doctors and nurses into contagious carrier pigeons?

Duncan, you will recall, was released into public after being initially diagnosed by physicians at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as a black man without health insurance, a condition, by the way, that was supposedly eradicated by the Affordable Care Act.  Such an abject failure to measure up to Jonas Salk left the President both addled and vengeful.   After publicly hugging infected nurse Nina Pham in the Oval Office (insert Clinton joke here) Mr. Obama pressed the governors of New York and New Jersey to relax quarantine restrictions on returning aid workers in an attempt to expose White Americans.  It is in this manner that the President hopes to fulfill Martin Luther King, Jr.’s   half-century old prophecy: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”

Precedent: The use of forced isolation dates back to the plague; in the U.S., broad scale quarantines were imposed during the Spanish Flu pandemic following WWI and more recently during New York’s 1992 Tuberculosis outbreak.  Well within his rights, then, Chris Christie was nothing if not prudent when he sequestered Kaci Hickox in a tent behind University Hospital in Newark upon her return from Sierra Leone with an apparent fever.  Yet Kaci, to Mr. Obama’s great delight, is now on her way home to Maine – to potentially spread the pestilence throughout New England – after complaints of civil rights violations that stem, in the main, from a lack of running water and cable television.  Quizzically, Ms. Hickox met eerily similar living conditions in Africa with nothing but alacrity.

A report published in 2007 showed that the Ebola virus can linger in semen months beyond “recovery” while more recent studies suggest that not only can Ebola survive on a doorknob for eight weeks, it is also transmissible by air.  Any one of these free-roaming vectors, therefore, could well be the next Gaëtan Dugas.   And even though the survival rate is markedly higher here than overseas, we reflexively regard these volunteers as vermin rather than Samaritans.  One do-gooder clinician can cause exponentially more harm than a popular high school freshman with a legally obtained firearm or a radicalized Muslim with a penchant for decapitation.

Perhaps, in the end, it is our Political Correctness that poses the greatest hazard.  If these folks can willingly live in a mud hut for six months, why can’t they live in a motel on the outskirts of town for a couple of weeks?  Do they have the Constitutional right to infect the rest of us?  Not only are we putting ourselves at risk by kowtowing to their demands, we are rearming the granola munchers over in Bolder who refuse to immunize their kids: Failing to prove that the Pertussis vaccine causes Autism, they can now demur on the grounds that the diaphoretic school nurse just got back from Liberia.