We're at a pretty dangerous moment in the ebola outbreak, not just because itself is
so bad – though it really is, it is really something worth worrying about – but because
it is getting us so afraid that we are beginning to consider doing things that are really stupid,
that would really make the outbreak worse.
One of those things is a travel ban.
"Many on the right are calling for an all-out travel ban" And it comes from an understandable
but really dangerous misconception about what about Ebola is dangerous to us.
The way to stop it, the way that will work to stop it, is not keeping people out of the
US, because we will never do that at a big enough scale and every time we've tried travel
bans – and we have tried travel bans a bunch of times before –
OBAMA:"22 years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States
instituted a travel ban... for people living with HIV/AIDS"
All they do delay disease.
The key to stopping Ebola in America is stopping it in West Africa.
And in order to do that, you can't do things like a travel ban that make it harder for
us to get doctors and more resources there.
You can't do things that make people who have Ebola want to hide.
We shouldn't be freaking out about small, isolated cases here.
We can stop those.
But we can't stop is a situation where Ebola gets to 100,000 or 5 million infections in
Africa, in Asia.
The scariest thing that I've heard about Ebola – its that for every four cases we know
about, there are six in West African that we don't know about.
Those cases are the dangerous ones.
Anything that makes people more afraid to go to a hospital and say yeah I was with somebody
who had Ebola and I'm feeling Fluish, that's really dangerous.
We need to create enough resources in West Africa to stop the outbreak.
We need to create a culture where people aren't afraid to go and get care.
And we need to be putting our best minds and our energy and our policy into stopping Ebola
there in order to keep it from ever becoming a threat here.