So the whole concept of “quarantine” is what... obsolete?
The concept of "quarantine" refers to isolating people who are actually sick, not trying to stop travel from a country where a few people are sick.
I think that at Ellis Island, people used to be screened for illness and turned away if they were sick. That is the principle behind airport scanning--people who are actively sick cannot board a flight.
It’s very important to understand why those in power are opposed to stopping arrivals of passenger aircraft from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, or imposing other types of border control such as quarantine.
On October 1, 2014, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an opinion paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., Rahm’s brother and an important Obama adviser in his own right. It was titled “Why Should High-Income Countries Help Fight Ebola”, and it contained the following language:
“…there are obligations of global justice to combat Ebola and strengthen health systems and infrastructure in affected countries in the longer term. Advocates of so-called cosmopolitanism – a key position in the philosophical debate about global justice – argue that national borders have no significance and that all people, regardless of where they live, are entitled to the same education, health care services, and other social resources…”
The people in power have been creating a borderless world for at least sixty years. They have achieved functional borderlessness in the U.S.A., using the covert revolutionary tactic “think of it always, speak of it never.” Most Americans still believe we have the ability to close our borders on short notice, when clearly we do not.
In any event, Obama, his Health and Human Services secretary, his Labor secretary, his acting Surgeon General, his Centers for Disease Control Director – all of them would DIE before they agreed to stop the flights, because doing it would affirm our borders as actual physical objects and demonstrate that it could be done, and they are mortally opposed to both of those things.