Replies

I hate agreeing with Shep, makes me feel dirty. But he’s right. What do we have so far, 2 actual cases in America of somebody getting ebola here? Out of a nation of 311 million, that’s basically nothing. Auto-erotic asphyxiation has probably killed more people in the same time frame.

“Out of a nation of 311 million, that’s basically nothing.”

I've worked with viruses, have altered their genome, and thus know a bit about them. Although I am not too worried about this becoming armageddon, every epidemic starts out with just a few ‘index’ cases, and this virus could easily affect 100s if not 1000s or more if not dealt with in a serious manner. It is not Shep's place to comment in this manner. There are Ebola experts who are concerned. I would have to give them a bit more credibility than Shep.

Auto-erotic asphyxiation has probably killed more people in the same time frame.

The number of cases of auto-erotic asphyxiation are extremely unlikely to start rising exponentially. These kinds of attempts to trivialize Ebola are ridiculous. In a region of the world with one of the most immobile population bases in the world, a disease with a 70% fatality rate has managed to double every 2-4 weeks, over an extended period of time. While there are plenty of reasons to have hope, and to think that the rest of the world will fare substantially better, trivializing this out of an unwillingness, or, in Shepard Smith's case, inability, to address the potential mathematics of this, is not wise, is not correct, and is not the display of calm reason that many people seem to assume it is.

Of course 3 cases is "nothing" in the sense of the number of cases at the moment. Your comparison is simply a strawman, since no-one thinks otherwise. The question is: are our advantages going to outweigh our disadvantages (which do exist, and are non-trivial) when confronted with Ebola, or vice versa? What is scaring people isn't the 3 cases. What is scaring people is the mathematics, and the possibility that our advantages aren't as great or as relevant, as some people assume.