Posted on 10/23/2015 8:31:54 AM PDT by Conscience of a Conservative
A nurse held for three days in quarantine at a Newark hospital last year after aiding Ebola patients in West Africa has filed suit against Governor Christie and members of his administration, saying they violated her constitutional rights by holding her against her will without due process.
The nurse, Kaci Hickox, had spent a month in Sierra Leone treating Ebola patients and training other health workers for Doctors Without Borders. When she returned home on Oct. 24 and landed at Newark Liberty International Airport, she became the first health worker ensnared in the Christie administration’s new policy to impose a 21-day mandatory quarantine on travelers arriving from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea who had come in contact with Ebola patients.
“We are filing this claim to hold those who made this decision accountable and also to highlight and fight against the lack of due process in the quarantine policy in New Jersey,” Hickox said Thursday via skype from her home in Oregon.
“It was clear to me that politicians and in particular Governor Christie were really reacting out of fear,” she said. “When you choose to detain someone out of fear that’s discrimination.”
The incident occurred last fall amid growing national worries about Ebola reaching the United States from West Africa, where an outbreak has killed more than 11,300 people and infected more than 28,500, according to the World Health Organization. Before Hickox’s return to the United States, a Liberian national who was visiting Texas died of Ebola at a Dallas hospital and Craig Spencer, a Manhattan doctor who had worked with Ebola patients in Guinea, set off a health scare in New York City after he rode the subway and visited a bowling alley while sick from the disease, though he didn’t yet know he had the virus. He has since recovered.
Related: N.J. releases details on mandatory Ebola screening and quarantine
Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled Ebola quarantine policies last October amid public concern that health workers who had been treating Ebola patients could not be trusted to self-quarantine when they returned to the United States. At one point, New Jersey had about 100 people in active monitoring, different than quarantine because they must contact local health officials daily and must take their temperatures and watch for symptoms.
Related: Ebola quarantine process criticized by health care worker isolated in Newark
When questioned about the quarantine policy last year, Christie defended it. “Your first and most important job is to protect the health and safety of the people who live within your borders, and the fact is that we’re doing exactly the right thing,” he had said. A poll taken a few weeks after the quarantine policy was implemented, 67 percent of New Jersey residents approved of the decision to quarantine Hickox, and just 19 percent disagreed.
Hickox, 34, is seeking $250,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer representing Hickox, said that amounts to $2,000 for each hour of her 80-hour detention plus extra for punitive damages.
The 35-page complaint, filed in the United States District Court of New Jersey, also names as defendants Mary O’Dowd, the former state health commissioner, as well as Christopher Rinn and Gary Ludwig, two other employees of the state health department.
Siegel said Hickox is suing Christie and others as individuals, which could mean the governor would have to pay for his own private lawyer as well as pay any judgment himself if the court sided with Hickox. “It sends a message to other elected officials that they will be held personally responsible for actions like this,” Siegel said.
Christie spokesman Brian Murray said Thursday the governor would not comment on the suit because it is a pending legal matter.
Ebola spreads through direct contact with body fluids or through exposure to objects contaminated with the virus, such as needles. Symptoms, including fever, headache and muscle aches, commonly appear within eight to 10 days of exposure, but the maximum incubation period is 21 days.
In her complaint, Hickox argues that she followed all Doctors Without Borders infection control policies while in Sierra Leone, such as wearing protective equipment when in contact with patients and keeping a three-foot distance from people suspected of having Ebola.
After landing in Newark and telling immigration officials she had been treating Ebola patients, Hickox was held apart in a quarantine center at the airport. “No one told her what was going on or what was going to happen to her,” the complaint states. “There seemed to be no coordination among the persons who interviewed her.”
Among those who questioned her was a man wearing a weapon belt “who spoke to Hickox aggressively as if she were a criminal,” according to the complaint.
When someone tested her with a non-contact thermometer, it registered a temperature, but an oral thermometer later used at University Hospital in Newark showed no fever.
Hickox was taken from the airport to the hospital in an ambulance escorted by eight police cars with lights flashing and sirens blaring, and she was held in an isolation tent in an unfinished section of the hospital facility with inadequate heating, the complaint states. She had to ask for several blankets to keep warm, and had no access to the outside world other than her cell phone, which had weak reception, making it hard for her to send or receive email for personal or legal reasons, according to the complaint. She had access to a portable toilet but not a shower.
“I felt completely alone and vulnerable,” Hickox said. “It was really hard. I had a lot of tough moments.”
While being held, she showed no symptoms of Ebola, and threatened legal action with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. At the time, Christie replied in response, “I’ve been sued lots of times before. Get in line. I’m happy to take it on.”
He also said he didn’t think the state’s quarantine policy would discourage health care workers from going to West Africa. “I think folks should understand part of the sacrifice is going over there and the remainder of the sacrifice is when you come home,” he said then.
Hickox was later released and went home to Maine, where she was kept under quarantine for several days until a Maine judge ruled she didn’t have to be quarantined.
Hickox’s experience became a cause celebre among other health care workers, and her case sparked national debate about how to handle people exposed to Ebola. Christie and President Obama also clashed publicly over the state’s quarantine policy.
Hickox said she did not sue University Hospital or the health care providers because they weren’t the ones who enforced the quarantine. She called the nurses, doctors and staff “wonderful, compassionate and kind.”
Before her stint in Sierra Leone, Hickox had also worked as a medical team leader, nurse manager and primary health care manager for Doctors Without Borders in Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Myanmar. Hickox married in the past year and moved to Oregon where she is “a clinical nurse educator for a large health care provider.” She has not been out of the country since Sierra Leone. But she said she hopes to do more humanitarian work overseas and hopes New Jersey’s quarantine policy is changed by then were she to land back in Newark.
Email: fallon@northjersey.com and oneillj@northjersey.com
if the do gooders, the likes of "doctors without borders(or common sense)" want to travel the world and be exposed, God love them....
but getting off the plane bringing it here?....suffer the consequences which is simply to stay away from others....
but even that request fell on deaf ears...
yes, ebola was overblown....but people did get exposed here by those coming from Africa and we needed to take some kind of action....good for Christie.
In Biblical times I would ask did they allow Lepers to live among others in society,or were they shunned and aside from the rest...
god recognizes their affliction and does not speak against the separation to prevent the spread to others which is by simple contact...
Used wrongly it is a Violation, she was in a contagious area and could have it and no symptoms yet...
I never understood why all these people who were exposed to Ebola always felt the need to go on vacation and mingle among large crowds.
Exactly.
Didn’t bother me at all. In the 1800s, towns would quarantine people and if they refused, they could and would be shot. To keep from endangering and infecting whole communities. No sympathy for this wretched “it’s all about me” whiney lib nurse.
Won’t stop some from trying to make it an issue.
Christie quarantined her immediately upon her arrival back in the US. She never refused to take the necessary precautions - she objected to the quarantine as an unnecessary step (and one that was not imposed or suggested by any medical experts anywhere).
She doesn't give crap about anyone.
I went back and reviewed her "stuff". Dhe was writing reports....really stupid reports. I try and find one that made me laugh. It was about traffic and disease. Crazy
Nope...Christie and Cuomo
Ebola is not leprosy, and Ebola is not contagious until someone shows symptoms. There’s a reason that no respectable medical group suggests quarantining unsymptomatic people who have been in Ebola-affected regions, or even who have treated Ebola patients. Christie was going against the scientific recommendations, purely to score political points based on people’s fear.
Not a Christy fan, but the quarantine was the proper thing to do. She made some poor choices and put the rest of us at risk; she needed to be isolated until the risk had passed.
I think it’s time for her to get over it. What did she loose, the ability to catch up with her DVR and a few days pay?
Wrong. Quarantines are necessary and important in times of dangerous disease.
No one knew a few years ago and little more is known now, about how ebola is vectored.
There have been threads in the past week about recurrence of ebola in a "cured" patient (she is in critical condition showing full symptoms), fears of ebola in seminal fluid and evidence that ebola lingers in the vitreous of the eyeball.
[[One does not have the right to spread possible contagion.
Once upon a time, they quarantined immigrants due to disease.]]
EXACTLY!- Even today- we are now asked EVERY single time we go to a health clinic if we’ve been to an infected country or been in contact with anyone with bola- it’s because of people like this nurse, and the one in Maine that REFUSED to be quarantined that we STILL have the ebola scare all across this nation
The abject failure of many others does not besmirch the sensible action by Christie.
Maybe so; but looking at it from a different perspective, quarantine might very well someday be used as a tool to imprison political dissidents without due process.
The Maine governor also tried to quarantine her.
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