President Obama discussed the proposal to institute a travel ban to protect America from the grown Ebola crisis, but suggested he wasn’t in favor of it because it might make Americans less safe:
“I want to make sure that everybody is clear about the issue,” Obama said. “I don’t have a philosophical objection necessarily to a travel ban, if that is the thing that is going to keep the American people safe. But the problem is is that in all of the discussions I’ve had thus far with experts in the field, experts in infectious disease, is that say travel ban is less effective than the measures that we are currently instituting–that involve screening passengers coming from West Africa.”
The president warned, “If we institute a travel ban instead of the protocols that we put in place now, history shows that there is a likelihood of increased avoidance. People do not readily disclose their information. They may engage in something called broken travel, essentially breaking up their trip so that they can hide the fact that they have been to one of these countries where there is a disease in place. And as a result, we may end up getting less information about who has the disease, they are less likely to get treated properly, screened properly, quarantined properly, and as a consequence we could end up having more cases rather than less.”
