Panic in the USA

In America, the conservatives are stirring up fear of Ebola and are holding President Barack Obama responsible for failing to ensure that people are safe from the virus. That’s a cheap election campaign trick, which unfortunately could work.

In actual fact, Americans like to make fun of German angst. For them, Germany is a country of doubters who rarely trust anything and immediately become paralyzed when they feel threatened. Not so these days. While in Germany, but also generally in Europe, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is reacted to professionally and relatively calmly, in the U.S., fear spreads.

Television stations broadcast fear-inducing images of quarantine stations. Parents no longer send their children to school, because an Ebola patient is being treated in a hospital one mile away. The Republican Congressman Darrell Issa wrongly claims that people could become infected when sitting on a bus next to an Ebola patient. A nurse is temporarily forced to stay in a tent following her return from Sierra Leone, even though she shows no symptoms at all.

All of this is useless in the fight against the disease. It allows the Republicans, however, to make President Barack Obama’s government responsible for the hysteria—which is essentially caused by the Republicans themselves. It is an election campaign, after all. The bad thing is that this tactic could ultimately help them to victory. Now that really is something to fear.