RUSH: You know, I knew New York City wouldn’t just sit back and let the news pass ’em by. Something as big as Ebola is not gonna miss New York. (interruption) No, no, no, no, no, I’m not laughing about it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m laughing about this terrible turn of events, but I am shaking my head in disgust. “There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t sweat it. We don’t need to shut down flights from these nations in Africa. It’s not a problem. Don’t sweat it.”
Just like we don’t have a terrorism problem in Canada. We don’t have a terrorism problem in America. What do you mean, kids want to join? They’re just acting out. We don’t have anything to worry about. Just ask Alfred E. Neuman, who sits in the White House, in the Oval Office. What, me worry? Nothing at all to worry about whatsoever.
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RUSH: New York, Ebola, a doctor traveling back from Africa. He was fully equipped and outfitted to avoid contracting the disease, and now we have another case of Ebola that has nothing to do with Thomas Duncan. The other previous cases were all related to him, but this case has nothing to do with Thomas Duncan. But don’t sweat it. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. Here’s Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, last night at Bellevue hospital during a press conference to talk about Dr. Craig Spencer. He’s 33, and she’s the health commissioner in New York City, and this is a portion of what she said.
BASSETT: We are aware that he went on a three mile jog, a sign that he was feeling quite well, and he also took the subway system. We know that he’s ridden on the A train, the number one train, the L train. We’re still getting more information about this, but we know that yesterday that he went to a bowling alley in Williamsburg. He was feeling well at that time, except for his feelings of fatigue.
RUSH: Yeah, fine and dandy. Nothing to see here, except for the fatigue. Just a little problem with fatigue but nothing to see here, folks. We know he rode the A train and took the L train, more information about this, but we know that he went to a bowling alley in Williamsburg and he was feeling okay at the time, so nothing to worry about. And that’s what the mayor, Mr. de Blasio, is also trying to convey.
DE BLASIO: We want to state at the outset there is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed.
RUSH: See?
DE BLASIO: Ebola is an extremely hard disease to contract. It is transmitted only through contact with an infected person’s blood or other bodily fluids, not through casual contact.
RUSH: Right.
DE BLASIO: New Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person’s bodily fluids are not at all at risk. We’ve been preparing for months for the threat posed by Ebola. We have clear and strong protocols which are being scrupulously followed and were followed in this instance.
RUSH: And Governor Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, still hasn’t reached the thousand mark yet in sales of his memoirs, still at 975, I believe, after the first week. They might have found some union people to pick up the slack, though, the way Fort Worthless Jim did. Fort Worthless Jim Wright, the former Speaker of the House in Texas, he wrote a book, and it was so good, it was so powerful, some pages only had two words. They had to find a way to make it reach 200 pages. It turns out that his union buddies ended up buying a hundred thousand copies, and that’s how he got it on the list. Nobody wanted it, and so far nobody is buying Governor Cuomo’s book.
My whole point here is, in stressing this again, is we live in a world where these are the people that we’re told are the rock stars. These are the kids in the big clique that are all popular, the Cuomos, the de Blasios, you name it, the Harry Reids, the Nancy Pelosis. Yeah, the people of this country admire ’em, they look up to ’em, and none of ’em sell any books. Hillary didn’t sell any books, especially against that $14 million advance.
My only point again in reminding you of this is that concomitantly while they try to make you believe that you’re laughed at and a laughingstock and a jerk and whatever, and these are the really cool kids, they’re not. Not even sold a thousand copies. Andrew Cuomo, the son of Mario the Pious, the former governor of New York. Anyway, he had to get in on this too and assure the people of his state that it’s okay.
CUOMO: We have had a full coordinated effort that has been working literally night and day, coordinating city, state, and federal resources, coordinating and drilling from airports to transportations to subway stations to ambulances, to hospitals. So we are as ready as one could be for this circumstance.
RUSH: Comforting. People in New York I’m sure are very assured. On the Today show today Matt Lauer interviewed Governor Cuomo and said, “If you’re this doctor and you’re so familiar with the disease — I mean, you’ve been treating Ebola patients in Guinea. You come back to America, you ride the subway, you take your Uber car, you go to a bowling alley. Do you think this doctor, Mr. Cuomo, did he act responsibly here?”
CUOMO: Look, I’m not a doctor, Matt. But the flip side of what you just said is: If you’re a doctor, you know you’re not contagious until you’re symptomatic. This is a doctor who’s taking his temperature twice a day, and obviously concluded that he was not symptomatic, and that’s why he went out — still in a limited way. He went bowling with two friends, he was with his fiancee, and he took the subway. But he obviously felt he wasn’t symptomatic. He knew that was the only time he was contagious. As soon as he had a fever, he presented himself, uh, to the hospital. All the procedures (from) there on were exactly according to the book.
RUSH: Now, fine. We’ll have to wait and see. But I do have a question. This is a doctor in Guinea. He got to Guinea. He came home from Guinea. Now, the director of the CDC, Dr. Frieden, has told us that we can’t stop these flights. We can’t do any of this because these people — our health workers — wouldn’t be able to get there. They wouldn’t be able to get home if we stopped flights from coming in.
This sort of disproves all of this, which is happening frequently. This is the problem. Okay, we’ll wait and see. We hope they’re right. We hope their assurances are solid and that this is handled and that there hasn’t been any spread. It’s encouraging that the second nurse is now Ebola free. The press conference was with her moments ago. But Governor Cuomo was not finished. He had just a little bit more to say.
CUOMO: We’ve been in contact with the federal officials. President Obama called last night, Ron Klain, the new Ebola czar. Uh, Sylvia Burwell, uh, head of Health and Human Services. Uh, so everything worked the way it should.
RUSH: You see, folks?
CUOMO: And our hope and our belief —
RUSH: Stop the tape. This is exactly my point. So they made some phone calls and problem solved. “Yeah, we called Ron Klain,” Ron Klain, who has no qualifications whatsoever to be Ebola czar, and who has yet to show up to an Ebola meeting. “But we got a phone call; we solved the problem. And guess what? We called Obama! When you call Obama, you really fixed it. I mean, that’s solving the problem. So we called Obama. We called Ron Klain, the czar.
Now, on Good Morning America today, Robin Roberts spoke with the chief health and medical editor at ABC — his name is Richard Besser — about the New York City Ebola case. She said, “Look, this doctor was in Africa; came back. He has Ebola here. How do you address the concerns of people about the border in all of this?”
BESSER: Some people are saying, “This is proof we should close our border.” I think it’s the exact opposite. It’s proof that until we knock this out of West Africa, we’re gonna see more disease here and we have to have more Dr. Spencers helping out over there.
RUSH: And, you see, that’s sort of irrefutable logic, right? “Shutting down flights from Africa? Why, that’s no way to stop the spread of disease, and this case kind of proves it.” (chuckles) It does? It proves that if we shut down flights from, say, Guinea, that Ebola would get here? Well, the fact is he didn’t shut down flights, and Ebola is here.
Yet they continue to say this. And, again, the sole reason for it is amnesty. They cannot do one thing… They can’t intimate, they can’t imply, they can’t suggest, they can’t even get near a serious discussion of closing borders, airports, flights. Because in mere weeks, Obama is gonna amnesty a bunch of illegal immigrants and keep the border open for even more.
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RUSH: Now, the CDC claims that they had everything in place to handle a doctor, an infected doctor arriving back in the United States from an Ebola-infested country. Now, according to a CDC press release on Wednesday, October 22nd, quote, “Six states,” including New York, “have already taken steps to plan and implement active post-arrival monitoring which will begin on Monday, October 27th.” This is the 24th. By their own admission, the plan they had to implement doesn’t start until Monday.
“Under active post-arrival monitoring, travelers without febrile illness or symptoms consistent with Ebola will be followed daily by state and local health departments for 21 days from the date of their departure from West Africa. So if this had been in place — and you may think this is a fine point, but these are the institutions that we’ve had to trust. We’ve had the governor saying, “We called Klain! We called the czar. We called the president. We called HHS. We called everybody.
“Problem solved! Everybody’s up to speed; our protocols are being implemented.” But they’re not. The protocols were not going to be implemented until Monday. If they had been in place, Dr. Spencer’s condition might have been caught earlier, and he wouldn’t have been on the A train. He wouldn’t have been on the L train. He wouldn’t have been in the bowling alley in Williamsburg if their protocols were in place like they said they were.
Yet their own press release on this says they’re not gonna implement them until Monday, October 27th. He might have had less opportunity to expose other people. Now, you might think I’m nitpicking and make a fine point out of this. That’s not my intention. They’re asking us to trust them, which is all we can do outside of become hermits and recluses — which, of course, I have no problem being. But other people don’t want to do that if they don’t have to.
When the mayor, the governor and the CDC director tell you that it’s hard to get, you can’t get it, and, “Our protocols are in place” when their protocols aren’t in place, it’s like Reagan said about the old Soviets: “Trust but verify.” Now we may be on the verge here of what I will call “Ebola Without Borders.” How uncanny or ironic is it that a guy from Doctors Without Borders ends up bringing Ebola to New York City, since arguably Obama’s policy of a nation without borders brought it here in the first place?
Let’s see, we have Doctors Without Borders. We have Ebola Without Borders, and now we have a nation without borders — and the key to all this is: No borders. Yet everything’s gonna be fine. It’s this idiotic, simple-minded, bizarre notion that if we shut down flights from these countries, it means we shut down aid flights. If we shut down flights from Africa then we are shutting down our opportunity to help people in Africa? How does that work? It doesn’t work!
Think about all the places the United States sends aid to in disasters or emergencies, tsunamis and this kind of thing. We send emergency aid. We send food. We send medicine. We’ve gone to Afghanistan, to Manila after a tsunami, to Japan after their nuclear meltdowns, to Rwanda and Somalia. We go everywhere! How is shutting flights down from three or four nations in Africa gonna stop that? Are there commercial flights out of any of those places at those times? No.
Yet somehow our C-140s and our mighty Navy manage to give billions of dollars in aid and send thousands of American relief workers to these places whenever we have to. How is it that all of a sudden now, if we restrict flights from arriving, we can no longer spread disaster relief around? It doesn’t make sense! And I tell you, again, it’s all because no matter what, you cannot take the politics out of anything that happens because any event is going to be politicized and massaged and used to the benefit of the Democrat Party agenda, including this.
And right now the big agenda item is amnesty and Obama’s green cards for nine million to 34 million illegals, and if this government makes any step towards shutting down flights, shutting down borders, then it becomes problematic. Then they have basically admitted that it makes sense to do it. And it would give them credibility problems if they keep the border open for illegals in another part of the country. So that’s why.
So we, the people of this country, are being indoctrinated to the political agenda of the president and his party, even when it comes to Ebola.
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RUSH: This is Matt, Fairfax, Virginia. I really appreciate your patience, and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Mega Nero Wolfe dittos, Rush. I appreciate you answering. I’ve got a point to make. Assuming this physician followed all the strict isolation rules in trying to prevent him getting the disease, I’m sure he followed every guideline and every directive —
RUSH: You would think. You would. I mean, this —
CALLER: You would.
RUSH: He’s 33 years old; he’s a doctor. He was in Guinea, I think, right? You would think he would take every precaution.
CALLER: That brings me to two points. One, I really do think there should be restrictions. I mean, even the Department of Defense has a smallpox response plan for smallpox written in 2002, even after the smallpox was, quote, “eradicated” in 1980. And it goes into isolation and quarantine guidelines, travel restrictions. You’re not supposed to travel 20 minutes from your house. You’re not supposed to go to any large areas, buses, airplanes, crowded facilities, et cetera, et cetera. We’re doing our country a disservice by not having such a guideline for Ebola. I mean, we really should be a lot more organized. We should be a lot more prepared for this. I mean, even the CDC says that the Ebola virus was found to be spread through airborne particles in the (unintelligible) plant, and they are quick to note that it had not been documented amongst humans, but that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen. And we’re playing Russian roulette by allowing people to travel.
RUSH: Well, it’s clear the United States, whether by accident or by design, has become a laboratory for this.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Because we don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know that we now are going to find out one way or another. Now, you mentioned smallpox.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: A lot of people — I’m gonna take a stab here and say that a lot of people do not remember or maybe know the real dangers of smallpox because it has been eradicated. There is a vaccine for it, but if there were ever a smallpox outbreak that was immune to this vaccine, we’re talking a disaster that you don’t even want to contemplate. And smallpox is more communicable, I think, than even what they’re saying Ebola is, and the only reason…
I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. I’m reading one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is called I Am Pilgrim, and it’s the first novel by an Australian named Terry Hayes, and it’s about an educated Islamist from Saudi Arabia who has been radicalized by the Saudi royal family. He was a Muslim to begin with, but his father was beheaded. This is in the novel. His father was beheaded by the Saudi government for simply speaking out against the king, and that can get you beheaded in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t want to give it all away from you, and I haven’t finished it yet so I don’t know the end, but what happens is that this radical Saudi Arabian doctor finds a genetic way to alter the vaccine and make it useless. He tests it on three people in the Hindu Kush. And in the novel it’s very apparent that it’s not hard to get this disease at all, particularly in a closed circumstance where you want the disease to spread.
He ends up having a whole bunch of the smallpox virus that ends up being shipped to the United States where there is supposed to be an outbreak, and I haven’t finished this. We’ve got all this vaccine. You’re right, caller. We have vaccine out the wazoo here. The story in this book is that it’s been genetically altered. The smallpox virus itself has been genetically altered to resist the vaccine, and it would cause utter disaster. And that’s the fear with Ebola. You can look at Africa.
We’ve got now up to 8,000 cases and a little more than 50% of the people have died. And yet there is no concerted effort to prevent travel from those nations to America. And a lot of people just don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense. And this has led to me, your beloved host, being misquoted all over CNN.
In fact, they’ve now spread this misquote to their website. And I know why they did it. Nobody watches! I happened to call ’em on it, and that caused new eyeballs to tune in. So they’re happy to run a total lie about something I said on their air and on their website because it might generate audience.
So I haven’t talked about it since that first time. But it was something that happened on CNN that caused my reaction. Some author, some Ebola expert, in explaining why we cannot prevent flights from Africa from landing in America is because — well, it’s kind of our fault.
He said, Liberia — which is one of the nations in Africa where the outbreak has been intense. Liberia exists because of American slavery, and this author said (summarized), “We can’t turn our backs. We cannot turn our backs!” Well, what does that mean? Does it we have to leave airports open? What does it mean, “We can’t turn our backs”?
We’re not turning our backs. We’re sending medical personnel over there to help; we have sent that serum that’s made from the Kentucky tobacco plant. We’re not turning our backs. Does it mean we’ve got to keep our airports open? Does it mean that it’s unfair they have Ebola and we don’t, since they are there because of us in the first place?
That’s this convoluted thinking, politically correct and otherwise, that is famous; the left is famous for it. So you’re sitting there, and you think, “Well, if you’re looking out for America, which what the president’s supposed to do, then you would take steps to make sure that what happened in New York didn’t happen.” A doctor is not supposed to come back here with this disease.
And we’re told we got protocols in place, except we learned today that the New York City CDC protocols don’t go into effect until Monday. The doctor came back before they’d be implemented. It’s right there in the memo, Monday, October 27th. Now, they’re up there talking about, the officials are, “We’ve done everything we could do. We’ve done everything according to book. We’ve done everything right.”
And they may have. But their own protocols for eliminating or preventing this are not even in effect yet, and that’s how the doctor got in. Now, I’m not dumping on the doctor. He may not have known. Same thing with Thomas Duncan — although he did know. The patient zero from Liberia, he got on the plane knowing he was infected. The doctor, he thought he took every step, every precaution. But he still got it.
Now he’s in New York isolated, and now it’s a laboratory to see what happens ’cause he has come in contact with people on subways and the bowling alley in Williamsburg. So we just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, people like Matt here say, “Wait a minute. Why is this even happening? We ought to not be permitting anybody from these countries to get back in — even people from the health community working with them — until they have passed a quarantine or a protocol or something that says they’re safe.
“We do not want to bring the disease into the country.” Too late for that. It’s already here.
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RUSH: By the way — I mean, just to keep you totally up to speed — the CDC posted a couple of tweets last night claiming that the doctor passed through the protocols at the airport. He got through with flying colors. The CDC was bragging about it before they knew the guy came down with the disease, I think. They describe him as having “successfully passed through the CDC’s enhanced screening for travelers from Ebola’s hot zones.” The Gateway Pundit has the details.
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