We don't need a travel ban to stop the spread of Ebola, says former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, just some good common sense.
"Not a ban by government but good common sense might work in watching the people that are exposed over there and coming into this country," Paul told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV Monday. "But for a government to just ban all travel, I'm not much interested in that."
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"You've got to put it in perspective," he explained. "We're talking about one person that's died, and we want to close down the world travel system."
"Over 500 people still die from tuberculosis every year, so you have a much greater chance of getting tuberculosis by flying an airplane, but you don't put a ban on everybody who has a cough to get on an airplane," he said.
"Right now the flu season started, you know how many people are liable to die? Tens of thousands." he said. "Actually the estimate is between 3,000 and 49,000 people die every year from the flu, so if you really want to do good for the world let's ban all people who have a cold because they might have the flu."
"Right now I would say a travel ban is politically motivated more than something done for medical purposes," he added.
The former Republican presidential candidate says there are questions about whether we really need an Ebola czar, but now that we have one "the real question is whether somebody not in the medical profession would know" much about Ebola.
But "there's more to it than that, what does the military know about this?" he asked.
"Sending 3,000 troops into a zone where they're worried about the spread of disease, that didn't make any sense to me either," he said.
"The approach has been wrong," he added.
"I'm hoping that the truth will come out," Paul contends. "I have always hoped . . . that we've overreacted and things aren't quite so bad as has been made out to be."
However, he says that so far he gives the Obama administration "a failing grade" for its handling of the Ebola crisis, as he does "most government bureaucrats."
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who is son of the former Texas lawmaker and a board-certified ophthalmologist, said Thursday that the Ebola virus can be picked up by someone standing three feet from an infected person and that it is
"incredibly contagious."
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The Texas Republican, who is a medical doctor and former obstetrician, said he's not sure that's exactly the case, but that he hasn't "dissected every single thing."
However, he said that he doesn't agree with Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who said that his claim is "an example of how Republicans are politicizing" the Ebola crisis.
"I'd like to think that one was a medical opinion and expressed in sincerity, and the other was pure demagoguery coming from a politician who pretends that she knows how to run the Democratic Party," Paul explained.
"Right now I would say I don't think she qualifies all that well . . . for criticizing a medical opinion," he added.