Dr. William Schaffner is not a man who will go along with the party line when it comes to Fox News, as evidenced by the interview he gave very recently.
The chairman of the Department of Preventative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Schaffner had a lot of information on the subject of the recent Ebola panic, and very little of it seemed to be what his host wanted to hear.
Calm Down, Everything is Fine While Jon Scott, the host of the interview, seemed to be trying to stoke public fears about Ebola (which had been used in medical thrillers like The Hot Zone for years), Schaffner was having none of it.
Schaffner explained that while the plane full of people who had an Ebloa patient in their midst might feel anxious, because she had no symptoms and no one came into contact with her body fluids there was no reason to worry.
Those people would be watched and monitored carefully, and once cleared they could go back to their lives. When the host attempted to play the conspiracy card against the government Schaffner explained patiently that no, the response thus far had been a textbook care of what to do when Ebola is present.
Even bashing the Texas hospital where mistakes led to the current panic got little traction. In the end Ebola is something dangerous to deal with, but it is nowhere near the horror story that fictional accounts have led people to believe. It’s being handled, and that was the clear message being sent.