<< This reaction reminds me so much of the fear, ignorance, and downright cruelty towards people who developed AIDS in the mid 80's. >>
I don't share your opinion. For starters, fear can be rational precisely because of uncertainty ("ignorance"). Do you have special knowledge that assures our nation that there is "zero risk" of the virus being spread here, once it's on American soil? I'm sure you acknowledge that caution is warranted. Caution is a manifestation of an underlying fear.
Also, I wouldn't call it "cruelty" if the two people who contracted the virus, in an area where contracting the virus is a known risk, are treated there rather than here. It would be a prudent measure on behalf of the nation. I would call it something worse than cruelty and something worse than ignorance if even a single other person contracts the virus in the US because of this decision, let alone if it ends up being the pandemic of the century (I fully expect one to eventually hit our nation, but let's not make things easier, shall we?).
We should give kudos to the two people for trying to help fellow human beings. But a health risk is called a health risk for a reason. The ethical question involved here is interesting ("game theory"): Does one try to save these two people, despite having no known method of doing so, when the risk is that millions more could share their fate, if a mistake is made or if the "zero percent risk" is actually non-zero, and the unthinkable happens? What is the trade-off here? Perhaps it really is as bordercolliefan suggests, that the trade-off is gaining more knowledge about the virus, as experiments are performed on these two unfortunate individuals, who are then being used as guinea pigs.
As for your AIDS reference... My assessment is that a politically correct Surgeon General flat-out lied to everyone about AIDS in the 1980s and beyond, in an attempt to shield gay people from being treated like plague-carriers. Thirty years later, and it's pretty apparent that the heterosexual population was never really at risk (unless through sharing needles or, rarely, through blood transfusions, or from having sex with a prostitute who might have contracted AIDS). Millions of people did not suddenly stop having sex, unprotected sex, or sex with multiple partners - and yet AIDS never did catch on (thankfully) in the general population. It's still essentially a "gay" disease", despite all the propaganda to the contrary. This is not a commentary on the worth of any person. It is a commentary on the truth that was never told out loud by health authorities. I cannot automatically trust what government health officials say. There may be an agenda sometimes.
