Since When Is Fever Not a Symptom of a Viral Hemorrhagic Fever?

Americans would be a whole lot less concerned about Ebola if the government showed any amount of competence at any level.

Instead, we’re getting Judge Jenkins gallivanting around in the same shirt after entering the first Ebola patient’s apartment, and “breach of protocol” when there was no protocol, from an administration headed by a man who had to be shamed into changing his travel plans — and appear to do his job.

Changing the president’s travel plans, by the way, is one that Major Garrett pointed out today is a move that the Obama White House has previously condemned — after Russian proxies shot down a passenger airliner over Ukraine.

So today, after the world learned that there is a second Ebola nurse, and that she flew on a commercial airplane while she should not have, the CDC director says this. (h/t Ace)

Update at 12:28 p.m.: During a teleconference with reporters Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said passengers on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 are at “extremely low risk” of being exposed.

That’s probably true. Only those who sat close to her are at most risk, and few of them probably actually touched her. Well, and any flight attendant who might have touched her. And any passenger who might later have been touched by the flight attendant. And those who had to decontaminate the airplane later…

What was I saying…?

Health-care worker Amber Vinson, who’d gone to Ohio to visit her mother, was not symptomatic when she boarded the return flight to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. But, Frieden said, Vinson did have a low-grade fever of 99.5 at the time. And because of her contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, Dallas’ initial Ebola patient, she should not have been traveling at all.

Fever, we have been previously told, is an Ebola symptom. Ebola is, in fact, a “viral hemorrhagic fever.” 99.5 is a low-grade fever, but it’s still a fever, which is an Ebola symptom. Vinson is a nurse and therefore knows what a fever is, and that it’s a symptom of Ebola, the viral hemorrhagic fever to which she knew that she had been exposed.

But the CDC director says that Vinson was not symptomatic, even though she had a symptom, a fever, of Ebola, which is a fever. Where does he come up with that? Did the WeSaySo corporation stealthily take over the CDC while no one was looking?

I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on cable access. But that man is not ready for prime-time in a crisis. Anyone can drive trucks through the holes in his logic.