Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has slammed the Obama administration for attempting “to downplay” the chances of catching the deadly disease Ebola.
“I think the first thing we should do is be honest about the disease, and I think President Obama’s administration has so tried to downplay the transmissibility of this and say, ‘Oh, it has to be direct fluid contact,’” Paul told
Concord News Radio.
“But then they kind of quietly say, `Well, you can get direct contact from being three feet from someone.’ So really, this is an incredibly contagious disease,” Paul said. “People in full gloves and gowns are getting it. So really they need to be honest [that] this is a very transmissible disease.”
The Republican senator also accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of not taking the killer virus seriously enough before the outbreak reached American shores.
“Recently, in their arrogance, they said that any hospital can treat this. Well, it turns out that not any hospital is equipped to treat this,” he said.
“A lot of those mistakes stem from an arrogance they have that sort of says, ‘Well we know everything about this.’ Well, they’re still learning about this. We’re all still learning about this. This is not something that is hard to catch. This is something that appears to be very easy to catch.”
Paul also attacked the CDC for allowing Texas nurse
Amber Vinson to travel from Cleveland to Dallas while she had a fever. She was diagnosed the next day with Ebola.
“It’s just been mistake after mistake,” he told Concord News Radio, a New Hampshire station, according to BuzzFeed.
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