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This crosses the line from the US government not telling the truth about the Ebola threat to the US government openly misleading Congress and the American people. This is a critical distinction. Nothing the govt. says about Ebola can be trusted now.

The US government is limited by the fact that no one in or out of government is omniscient. Anyone speaking on Ebola must limit their message to what is currently known about Ebola--and that actually is very little. Given the lethality of Ebola and lack of medicines to treat it with, it must be handled under the most stringent conditions, in BSL4 labs that have been engineered in such a way that nothing can escape. It takes a lot of training to work in those labs, and few of those labs exist. Efforts to build more labs are met with resistance from the community at the proposed lab site, because people are absolutely sure that the mere presence of a BSL4 lab in their town or city will unleash a horrible disease. As a result, the amount of research that can be done on viruses like Ebola is limited. And now that people are intensely interested in the answers to these questions, those answers simply do not exist.

NIAID Director Fauci carefully and deliberately misled Senator Burr, who asked a direct question about Ebola transmission via fomites. Dr. Fauci did not say he didn't know, or couldn't answer. His credibility is gone, and so is that of the NIAID while he is in office.

I have professional expertise here. I once broke a defense psychiatrist on the witness stand in cross-examination, and did the research which destroyed Carl Sagan's scientific career over the radiological part of the Nuclear Winter hoax. S.Fred Singer did the deed based on my research. I spotted Sagan's fraud the instant I read it - this is in my FREEP posting history.

The MSDConline (Canadian) website description of Ebola states at:

http://www.msdsonline.com/resources/msds-resources/free-safety-data-sheet-index/ebola-virus.aspx

"SURVIVAL OUTSIDE HOST: The virus can survive in liquid or dried material for a number of days"

and referenced a footnote 23 for this which has since conveniently disappeared from that website.

Dark Wing was entirely correct. Dr. Fauci misled Senator Burr more from reflex PR than for any and all policy reasons. But this will kill far more Americans from fully justified distrust of the federal government concerning Ebola, should there be more than a few cases of it here, than any good which Dr. Fauci's lie here might do.

Really? With all its funding (our money) we have studies on why 75% of lesbians are fat, we have studies of shrimp on treadmills, etc., and we have every conversation involving electronic means recorded, but diddley squat is 'known' about a disease which kills 30-90% of the people who get it?

I think the problem is more one of priorities and allocation of resources than anything else.

The government owns 95% of Nevada, for instance, and half of the land west of the Mississippi. If it wants to build a lab, it has ample space far from the nearest neighbor.