President Obama issued an executive order today preventing government contractors of their personnel from being sued for any damages resulting from their bringing the Ebola virus into America.
The president’s directive gives the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) the authority to indemnify companies from lawsuits related to “contracts performed in Africa in support of USAID's response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa where the contractor, its employees, or subcontractors will have significant exposure to Ebola.”
This authority may be exercised solely for the purpose of holding harmless and indemnifying contractors with respect to claims, losses, or damage arising out of or resulting from exposure, in the course of performance of the contracts, to Ebola,” the memorandum explained.
CNSNews.com emailed USAID to ask if the president’s directive also protects these companies from being sued by a U.S. citizen who contracts Ebola from an employee who brings the disease back from West Africa after working under a government contract.
An unnamed spokesperson for the agency responded: “Yes. The indemnification applies only to the extent that the claim, loss, or damage arises out of or results from exposure to Ebola in the course of performance of a contract and exceeds applicable insurance coverage.”
In other words, if a Company A employee contracts Ebola while working in West Africa, brings the disease back to the United States, is not quarantined and ends up infecting members of the general public, Company A is protected from any damages arising from lawsuits by these secondary victims.
Considering how certain doctors and nurses persisted in wandering around and refusing to be quarantined, I think what we're seeing here is damage control for a problem that is going to become a lot worse..especially when those 3,000 troops the president sent into ground zero of an epidemic start coming home.
This president claims his authority to do this without consulting congress supposedly comes from Public Law 85-804, which allows the president the authority to enter into, amend or modify contracts with private companies in order to “facilitate the national defense.”
I certainly had no clue that Liberia was vital in any way to our national defense, did you?
Barack Obama, the cherry pickin' president. Oath be damned. He will faithfully execute the laws he likes, even if he has to twist them out of recognition. And he'll ignore the ones he doesn't.
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