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
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3352042/posts?page=174#174
So you wouldn’t mind hosting them!
They think that it was awful to quarantine princess Kaci.
Whats awful is someone that has a potential plague in them walking freely among us.
Then again I have a conscience and would quarantine myself rather than wipe out half the country. I’m kinky like that. Once, most people were.
I’ve explained several times why there is a difference between saying that they do not need to be quarantined and saying that I would want to live with or host them. “No close contact” does not require a quarantine. But you just don’t get it. So you, once again, go round and round in circles, repeatedly ask me questions I’ve already answered, and repeat the same points over and over again.
Once again, history has proven my position correct. You and people like you were predicting a massive outbreak in the US. It never happened. Because the recommended protocols (and first-world infrastructure) stop Ebola in its tracks. You can keep going on and on about how dangerous this non-infected nurse was, or could have been in an alternate universe. But that does not change the fact that there was no outbreak. She didn’t infect anyone. The protocols worked. The sky did not fall.
And I have shown that your position is contradictory.
You won’t host those exposed to Ebola in your house (174) but insist they aren’t an issue if no symptoms are present (31).
Even worse, the zombies who think it was awful to expect princess Kaci to...not break quarantine!
Existential Cage Theory is EXISTENTIAL. Literally.
She acted in a petulant childish manner, and should be treated as a child until she shows adult cognition.
Thats what cages are for. To treat them and their supporters like the childish unthinking animals they are.
“Time out box” after a fashion, might work.
Yes. For all time.
And I have repeatedly explained why that is not contradictory (and thus why the protocols recommend against close contact, but do not recommend quarantine). Your failure to acknowledge my answer does not change that fact.
I loved reading the following:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6417a6.htm
http://throb.gizmodo.com/turns-out-the-ebola-virus-can-be-sexually-transmitted-1737730480
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-1012-ebola-fever-20141012-story.html
12.9% present no fever, and it is transmissible for over five months after being “cleared”.
And Princess felt that quarantines were for the little people.
And we still have no idea where this bug hides between outbreaks, don’t know long term post infection secondary behavior.
It is contradictory.
And she did NOT follow protocols.
She acted in a manner of a spoilt brat who should have had her backside warmed and put in a corner.
The only upside to Ebola is that when the liberals finally unleash it or another killer pandemic, it’s liberals that are most poorly suited to survive it or the Roadwarrior/fallout world it leaves behind.
Darwin wasn’t entirely mistaken it seems.
Sadly.
And it does seem that a brutish existence is what is coming to the US.
It is not contradictory:
People who have been exposed to Ebola are not contagious unless and until they develop Ebola symptoms. So, no quarantine is necessary and thus not part of the protocols.
But, when they develop symptoms and start shedding bodily fluids (sweat, vomit, diarrhea, etc.), those fluids are VERY contagious. Which means that living with someone when they begin to show symptoms is highly risky. So, avoiding close contact is necessary and thus part of the protocols.
Yes, it is contradictory.
Would you host someone in your house who was exposed to Ebola?
What this all comes down to is spelled out clearly in the 1936 Communist goals. To be specific, Liberals took over education and the med/psych profession just as their forebears, the open communists instructed.
The result has been 3 solid generations denied factual education and given agenda science, along with a megadose of feelgood.
The result is as hard to predict as night following day.
People get their groins all sandy over me saying that sort of thing and calling me and others that see the reality, doomsayers and tinfoilers. So be it. Doesn’t change the truth of how we got here or where we are going. And we are GOING there precisely because they refuse to do a solitary thing to change course.
Elect more lesser evil. That’s sure to fix the problem. I mean how couldn’t electing the very people responsible fix things? See 3 generations of miseducation for why adults in 2015 on the right think exactly like that.
If they don’t think like that, I challenge anyone to explain why they keep electing them to do it.
“In the land of children, Santa Claus wins elections” forget where I heard it, but it suits what we’ve been seeing.
And it is the sure outcome of that infiltration you point out.
Heck, the proof is in entitled princess Kaci’s behavior.
And those defending it.
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