In a rather bizarre leap of logic, Democratic congressman Steve Cohen compared the mandatory Ebola quarantines enacted in several states to the case of Terri Schiavo, the patient pulled from life support in 2005 following a long and public legal battle.
The Tennessee lawmaker appeared on CNN Thursday to express his opposition to the 21-day quarantines mandated for health care workers returning from treating Ebola patients in West Africa. New York, New Jersey and now Maine have all enacted different versions of this policy.
“They are doing what the public has been driven to think, and they’re appealing to the public,” Cohen said of the governors behind the quarantines. “Politicians should respond to the public, but they should respond to science first.”
The lawmaker claimed that most scientists believe the risk to the public from returning health care workers is small, likening those who believe otherwise to global warming deniers.
“I think this has strictly been driven by politics and fear-mongering,” he said, “and I think we’ll look upon it one day like Terri Schiavo.”
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