CDC has no control over these individual hospitals, that in the privatized hospital system that we operate in here in the United States, the CDC can only offer guidelines, and it’s up to individual hospitals whether they’re going to enforce those guidelines, practice those guidelines. And, in fact, the CDC said yesterday, after your press conference, that they have no plans to investigate what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, that that’s the responsibility of the local Department of Health in Texas.
the workers were actually in Dallas on the conference call, whereas the union leaders were in Oakland at their national headquarters. And so, because there are no nurses unions in Dallas that represent the workers—so these are non-unionized workers, who were exposed for the possibility of being fired for talking publicly about this situation, and so they actually—as reporters asked questions, they emailed; the nurses emailed their responses to.
they listened, and they emailed their responses to the union. hen the union read their responses to the reporters. And this is because of the fear, obviously, that many employees have that they might be retaliated against for talking about these issues and talking about the lapses of their own institution.
this hospital has been saying from day one that the protocols were there and everything was good, the protocols were there, they were fine. And I think, you know, to be honest—and then to have the nurses come out and the healthcare workers come out and say, “Oh, no, it wasn’t. No, it was not. This was a lot of, you know, changing of information, not enough equipment, not the right equipment”—you know, I think they’re absolutely right, that they—you know, their fear of being retaliated, because they have come out when the hospital continues to say. And this is the problem. They all continue to say they’re ready. We don’t need another Dallas in another state if another patient shows up.
now the NIH says they are developing a vaccine. It sounds like this has been possible for a long time, but private corporations—and which this is usually their purview—they knew there wasn’t a lot to be made in this profit-wise. So, this is why there were so few shots available, whether it’s a vaccine or other drugs.
most of our innovation is driven by the private sector. And from their point of view, Ebola was not a predictable disease, and those who got Ebola were too poor to pay for it, and so there’s been a lack of investment. Not only were there not enough doses of ZMapp and things, but they weren’t even tested. There are only now vaccines and others going through clinical testing. And so, we really just don’t have those things on the ground.
Just want to make a very quick comment, if I can, about—we call ourselves the most advanced health system in the world, but what do we mean by that? I think what we mean by that is, is that we have the best of the best of the world. But we also have a highly variable system—so many different hospitals, so many different emergency rooms. We have over 3,500 local health authorities. Everybody is—we’ve got such different standards about what we can do. And what we need to do, as Karen says, is up our game. We need to be more uniform, and we need to have systems in place and the kind of equipment and training at every institution, so that this doesn’t happen again. It’s really unacceptable.
Washington Post writing, “In the medical response to Ebola, Cuba is punching [far] above its weight.” Cuba answering the call by sending 165 health workers to hard-hit Sierra Leone, a disproportionately large number for a tiny island nation of 11 million people.
Cuba is—always sends a lot of health workers to humanitarian crises. And I think it is—we need to do much more of that ourselves. But I have to say this: We are—we have sent our military in when very few others have. I think we need to do a heck of a lot more, but the rest of the world needs to do more. I mean, they have just been sitting back and letting this epidemic get out of control, even after the U.N. Security Council. I would venture to say that I would like the U.N. Security Council to come back and pass a binding resolution that would actually set markers for the kinds of resources that are needed to bring this under control. And I think if we do that, we’ll really show a seriousness of purpose. And I think we can do this.
— source democracynow.org
Lawrence Gostin, university professor and faculty director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. He is also the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law.
Karen Higgins, registered nurse and co-president of National Nurses United. She works as an intensive care unit nurse in Boston.