I believe that Ebola is a serious disease, I really do. But to date, exactly zero Americans ---and one West African has died from the disease here on American soil.Sadly, this hasn't stopped people like Chris Christie and the right wing fear machine from making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess it's a good election tactic. If Willie Horton type ads doesn't fire up your base, the fear of the president bringing plane loads of Ebola infected Africans to America certainly will.
Poor Kaci Hickox should have been greeted as a hero after going to West Africa to help to fight the terrible disease head on. Instead she was held against her own will in New Jersey after Mr. Christie enacted a mandatory quarantine.
And I am ripping Christie and the right, but New York's democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, is also as culpable for this travesty that beset this woman.
When politicians start defying scientist and they take such drastic measures as holding unsuspecting citizens against their will, we have to step back and realize that we might just have some issues as a country.
“'Her civil rights were violated,' Siegel told ABC News. “At a minimum, she could bring an action for damages. But I think her goal is to try to revise the current policies with regard to, for example, mandatory quarantines.”
'when you look at what happened and how it happened, you come away with the sense that this policy was based on fear and politics rather on medical fact, and we can’t have the politicians directing these kinds of important issues,' Siegel said. "
I hope that she does bring an action for damages. It should be fun to see where this goes.
Still, it's always interesting to read the comments after a story, and this one was no exception.
A sampling:
---I think Kaci Hickox is being completely selfish and irresponsible. We have already seen 2 nurses get infected on US soil and doctors evacuated back to the states because they were infected. Then there is the doctor who spent 6 days in NYC before he was diagnosed. The US response to Ebola has been sloppy and extremely lucky. We are lucky that there were not hundreds of new cases because of all the mistakes that were made. Twenty-one days of quarantine is a small price to pay to be 100% sure that you will not infect and kill another person. The elderly, small children, people with weak immune systems and pregnant women would all be at much greater risk to die from ebola than a healthy adult. We do need healthcare workers to help with the ebola crisis and we do believe they are true heros but until ebola is understood a lot better than it is today, let's err on the side of common sense and caution and use quarantine for the purpose it was intended instead of lawyering up and demanding to skip quarantine because it violates your civil liberties. Epic fail in both common sense and good science.---
