Last week American Airlines reported the first actual evidence that the American people are reacting to the largest Ebola outbreak in history: a one-day hiccup in ticket sales, which appears to have been inspired not by the deadly hemorrhagic fever itself but by the government’s own self-soiling response to it. The New York Post reports:
The Dallas-based carrier said the change in bookings happened after US congressional hearings on Ebola last week. The effect lasted a day and bookings quickly returned to normal, airline executives said on a call with analysts and reporters.
Other US airlines have said they have not seen any impact on bookings from concern about the disease.
That there has not been an Ebola panic suggests that common sense and independent-mindedness are still alive in America, despite the horrendous stupidity on display by nearly all of officialdom.
Since National Review Online reported last week that there is no evidence of a public Ebola panic, a medical doctor recently returned from close contact with Ebola patients has traipsed around Manhattan, riding multiple subway trains and going bowling in Williamsburg, before being diagnosed with Ebola; and a recently returned nurse, who also recently was in close contact with Ebola patients in West Africa, has made so much noise about a quarantine order that New Jersey governor Chris Christie — who has no qualms about bullying, insulting and violating the personal freedoms and property rights of Jersey Shore residents in support of his Duneboggle global-warming project — quickly caved and sent her on her way to Maine. Well-past-his-expiration-date NIAID director Anthony Fauci also returned to Face the Nation to reiterate his complaint of an “epidemic of fear” gripping the stupid masses. Fauci appeared on all five Sunday shows the previous week to state that public officials should engage in biohazard security theater to reassure the ignorant population.
This grotesque irresponsibility by people who should know better has obscured some positive developments in the Ebola epidemic that has already killed more people than all previous outbreaks and generated the first known human-to-human transmissions in the United States. Several high-profile Ebola patients — including both nurses infected by the late Thomas Eric Duncan as well as Ashoka Mukpo, the NBC cameraman, reincarnated lama and Ebola crush object who contracted the virus when he was on a team led by quarantine-breaker Nancy Snyderman — have recovered from the virus.
It has also obscured the fact that there continues to be no public panic (or “hysteria,” to use President Obama’s misogynistic phrase) over Ebola. Impressively named New Yorker news editor Jay Caspian Kang visited one of the subway lines known to have been used by idiot doctor Craig Spencer while he was ignoring common-sense quarantine procedures. Sadly, Kang found no evidence of panic, only slightly heightened awareness of how much human effluvia end up on mass transit vehicles:
On Friday morning, the first since the news came out that Craig Spencer, a New York City doctor who had tested positive for Ebola, had taken the L train to Bedford to go bowling at the Gutter, on nearby North Fourteenth Street, the station was the focus of some scrutiny, especially from the news vans parked by the entrance. There was nothing much to see. On the platform, a busker sang an acoustic, minor-key adaption of a Charli XCX song. No one wore homemade hazmat gear, none of the neighborhood’s Europeans made jokes about Ebola, and nobody seemed loath to participate in the usual shoving and elbowing into the crowded cars.
Don’t let that “nothing much to see” fool you. Kang goes on for nine more paragraphs. Because there is no Ebola panic among people who didn’t go to college, and the rest of us will not stop until there is.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled the last name of Jay Caspian Kang, who remains impressively named despite the regrettable error.