Krauthammer’s Take: ‘National Consensus’ in Favor of Ebola Quarantine for Returning Aid Workers

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s1CdHiWwsZQ%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage

“Even though there’s a dispute over the details” of how best to monitor returning aid workers from Ebola-stricken countries — a dispute demonstrated today when the governors of New York and New Jersey rescinded their mandatory quarantine plans following pressure from the White House — “there is now a national consensus, as there should be,” says Charles Krauthammer, “that if you return from that zone, particularly if you have a fever, you can be in quarantine.”

The administration seems to be internally at odds, Krauthammer noted: “If you’re going to put soldiers in quarantine in Italy, because they were in the hot zone — none of whom, presumably, have a temperature sure, none of whom have symptoms — and then you say, if you’re an aid worker who comes back on your own into Newark airport you’re not going to be in quarantine — it makes no sense.”

But the public reaction, Krauthammer argued, suggests a growing consensus in favor of safety: “Of course [it] is an infringement on your civil liberty. . . . [But] it’s the principle that we seem to all to agree that quarantine — meaning the state depriving you of liberty — is the way to go in a potential epidemic.”