Dr. Ben Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said Friday it's "not an overreaction" to ban all travel coming into the United States from the three West African countries affected by Ebola.
"It's actually common sense and logic," Carson told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on
"The Kelly File."
"Why would you bring something dangerous in here?" he said. "Or let something dangerous come into our country on purpose?"
Twenty-two other countries have banned travel, and other African countries have "put up an isolation wall," the potential presidential GOP candidate said.
So, then, he argued, "are we the only one who is are so wise and everybody else is a fool? I don't think that's the case."
Meanwhile, Ebola has become one of "so many things that we make into partisan issues that are not partisan at all... they're things that affect all of us," said Carson.
But there is a "bandwagon event" in which "people see a person as their leader and they jump on that bandwagon without investing any intellectual thought into this at all," he said.
What people need to do, said Carson, is ask themselves what they would do if one of their loved ones were in proximity to someone from one of the West African countries.
"Would you be comfortable bringing that person in and putting them within proximity of your loved one?" Carson said.
Meanwhile, it's time to get rid of the "foolish arguments" on Ebola.
"We need to get together an international coalition, but we don't want to wait," said Carson. "We need to move our forces in there. And we need to not only contain it but we need to eradicate it there."
If Ebola is not eradicated, said Carson, and if "it spreads across that continent and into the Middle East and then subsequently into South and Central America, it doesn't matter how wonderful the protocols are we have from CDC, and it doesn't matter how much our experts know. We'll be inundated with cases."
Meanwhile, Carson said he doesn't agree with President Barack Obama's appointment of Ron Klain, who is Vice President Joe Biden's former chief of staff, as Ebola czar, or that a czar is even needed.
"We certainly have enough czars already," said Carson. "There's nothing in our constitution that allows for the appointment of czars."
He pointed out that the heads of several different agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or secretary of Health and Human Services, could coordinate efforts on Ebola.
"This is absolute political nonsense," he said of Klair's appointment.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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