{UAH} The Path and Response of Ebola in America

The Path and Response of Ebola in America

By Malik Sekou Osei 

October 16^th, 2014

      America has become the more than consistent partner in the dance of profane crisis. The dance of overreaching imperialism and containing the crisis of the world outside of its borders, It failure has become more than obvious seems to rely on its optimistic rhetoric of “American Exceptionalism” that finds expression in the loquacious elucidation by Barack Obama. While the American celebrity culture of denial and distraction will not prepare its internal population for the necessity of rapid “Universal Health Care” and health care as a human right and not a privilege of private profit based on race and class distributions, while the American social and political fantasy as reality as always been the talking-head sterile phenomenon of investigation and protracted due process. Where nothing is actually done and only an articulation of officials to only rationalize smaller and better government and the centralize discipline of the private sector, through seemly rational subterfuge arguing efficiency. This subterfuge is given arguments of efficiency of distribution (for profit) over socialize medicine and bureaucracy. For the political and social culture in America the thinking is the best social and political organization to give services is one that private and profit making.

  While in understanding any response to any American crisis, one has to look and elucidate; in whose interests in terms of profits does retorting to crisis benefits.

   What makes American social and political culture more than unique is how easily the American population can be distracted by slogans of “American Exceptionalism” through the delusions of celebrity culture. For American culture has only the conceptualization of the pragmatic slave who has to experience work condition of the slave-mode-of-production after hearing the master convince him about free room and board.

  This has been the principle response of the Obama admiration of sentimental and emotive subterfuge of everyone to chip in to carry out state responsibilities of health, like eating more vegetables and avoiding bacon cheese burgers, while no one has adequate health care protection or coverage.        

  This week we all have seen very new development with the fluidity of Ebola and every new development in the Ebola outbreak in the United States further exposes the inept, mediocre and reckless character of the official US response to what the World Health Organization has called “unquestionably the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times.”

          Thomas Duncan  The World Health Organization

      Last Wednesday, the sobering news from US officials revealed that a second nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital engaged in treating the lifeless body of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan had tested positive for the disease. The was allowed to fly on a commercial aircraft twice, from Dallas to Cleveland and back, after having been exposed to the disease. She then reported having a fever during her return flight.

                                                   National Nurses United

      On Tuesday, may not believe the actual protocol of the hospital administration in relation to their own health care workers in facing its first Ebola victim. One would think that an administration of health care would know the correct protocol in handling any victim of Ebola. National Nurses United, which is the largest nurses’ union in the US, revealed that nurses at the hospital had been directed by administrators to provide care for Duncan, a native of Liberia, with only part of their faces and necks exposed. They were told to counterbalance for their lack protective equipment by wrapping medical tape around their exposed skin. The only shows the cynical disregard for the work conditions of the working nurses and other health care professionals.  

      Despite nurses' objections and complaints, Thomas Duncan was left for hours in a common waiting area with other patients, possibly infecting them. His lab specimens were allowed to travel unprotected throughout the hospital's tube system, possibly contaminating the entire system. Nurses forced to treat Duncan with inadequate protective garments were then told to carry out their normal hospital duties, visiting and possibly infecting other patients.

      These shocking and offensive violations of basic Ebola contamination protocols took place after Duncan had been taken to the hospital a second time in an ambulance because family members suspected that he had gotten the disease.

     Barack Obama  Chuck Hagel Susan Rice

      On Wednesday, President Obama responded to mounting public concern and criticism by staging a photo-op with cabinet officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and National Security Adviser Susan Rice. He issued a brief and routine statement and took no questions from the press in what was clearly an exercise in damage control.

      Nothing said by Obama or any other government official can be believed. Their dominating concern is to cover up their responsibility for the disaster, not to speak the truth with the people about what is necessary to protect them.

      The first known victims of the negligence of hospital and government officials are medical workers, whose lives have been recklessly endangered. The indifference to the safety and health of these workers sums up the attitude of the ruling class to the well-being of the population as a whole.

      This is not the first time that an emergency has exposed the fact that matters relating to the health and social conditions of the general public are of absolutely no concern to those who wield economic and political power in America.

      Nine years ago, the virtual destruction of a major American city by Hurricane Katrina exposed the lack of any preventive measures to combat the impact of a major flood in a region repeatedly flooded in the past, or protect the lives of New Orleans’ working Black community. The disaster itself blatantly exposed the scandalous conditions of poverty, and the belated, random and hopelessly incompetent and insufficient government response led to nearly 2,000 deaths

 

 

      Katrina                      

				Katrina Katrina photo: Hurricane Katrina This photo was uploaded by mpearce0220
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      Just five years later, the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig once again exposed the criminal negligence of the corporations and the complicity of the government. This was an entirely man-made disaster, the result of cost-cutting and unsafe methods on the part of BP that was accelerated by the government regulatory agencies. The cleanup effort was handed over to the company that was responsible for the disaster in first place.

                  Deepwater Horizon Oil explosion in the Gulf of Mexico

      In between and since there have been countless plant explosions, fires, coal mine disasters and industrial accidents in cities throughout the United States.

      The American corporate capital businesses with its political frontmen such as Obama view issues affecting the safety and well-being of the American population as more of an annoyance. They lessen from the business of generating ever greater profits for the corporations and ever greater fortunes for the rich and the super-rich.

      Like every other aspect of the social infrastructure of America, the health care system has been degraded as a result of decades of budget cuts and profit-gouging by pharmaceutical and insurance companies and hospital chains.

      While it had been known for decades that an Ebola outbreak could happen in the United States, no effort was made to adequately prepare for one. No vaccine has been brought into production. Instead, the resources needed to address pressing health issues have been diverted to pay for war and conquest abroad and the ever-greater enrichment of the American financial aristocracy.

      Earlier this week, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan explained the failure to develop an Ebola vaccine, saying, “a profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay.”

            Dr. Margaret Chan         Dr. Francis Collins

       Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the US National Institutes of Health, told the Huffington Post that a vaccine for Ebola would likely already exist if not for multi-billion dollar cutbacks in health care research.

      While, it must be noted that Barack Obama is simply a continuation of US policy of imperialism and thus the contradiction is beyond him and his administration, but nevertheless he is just a continuation of the system of private profit. Where all institutions within capitalism are solely governed for and by profit and this takes effect in the lives and conditions of the people and life expectancies.  

      These latest disasters expose the bankruptcy and failure not just of one administration, but of the capitalist profit system itself. The subordination of all social concerns, including health care, to the corporate drive for profit and the money-mad greed of the ruling elite, together with the irrational division of the world into rival nation states, makes the rational and socially beneficial development and utilization of the productive forces impossible. Instead, obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a few are accompanied by the decay of basic social services and mounting poverty for the masses.

      A serious campaign to halt the widening Ebola outbreak in Africa and its spread to the US and other countries requires:

   A) The establishment of an international team of doctors, scientists and health care professionals to take the response to the crisis out of the hands of corporate-dominated governments. This team, developing a global plan of action, must be provided with whatever resources are needed—however many billions of dollars—to treat all those already infected and prevent the spread of the disease.

   B) A state-funded research program completely independent of the profit interests of the health care industry, the drug companies and the insurance giants must be established to rapidly develop and make available to all an anti-Ebola vaccine as the first step in conquering this and other infectious diseases that are linked to poverty.

     This is not merely a scientific task. It is a political question.

      It is necessary to draw the appropriate conclusions from the Ebola outbreak and the string of disasters and calamities that preceded it. The application of a rational and humane response to the Ebola calamity, along with all the other social contradictions and predicaments that are intrinsic to a society based on exploitation, requires a struggle by the people and their revolutionary commitment and organization to reorganize society on socialist foundations to meet social needs, not private profit. This includes taking the profit out of medicine and providing high-quality health care to all as a social right.

     The first step is to negate the subterfuge and gather a greater clarity of the contradiction of the world and the enemies of humanity.

      For History is on our side, but not time…  

 

 

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

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