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
Typhoid is not Ebola. Typhoid carriers (like Typhoid Mary) can transmit the disease without ever showing symptoms. Not so with Ebola.
What?! Chris Christie is running for President?! The dickens you say!!!
The Maine governor imposed a “voluntary quarantine,” and failed when trying to make it mandatory, because he lacked justification for a mandatory quarantine.
MeganC, the Bill of Rights does not guarantee any suppositious right to violate quarantine. It is also a state matter, not a federal matter.
CoaC, there were no political points to score here. It was just common sense.
l90, she can call herself whatever she wants, but she spent a month in a hospital in Sierra Leone during an Ebola outbreak. She could easily have been exposed.
She had one job: to stay home for 21 days (the incubation period plus test result waiting period if she was exposed) and then get tested after that period to show no exposure.
But she felt her desire to go shopping and biking was more important than making sure that she wasn't exposing others to a deadly disease.
She's an obnoxious leftist who doesn't care about actual Constitutional rights, and she's looking for free money from NJ taxpayers and ME taxpayers.
Pretty much.
Scientifically-based quarantines that are relevant tot he transmissibility of a dangerous disease are necessary and important.
Quarantines (like this one) that go against the science, and are used instead to score political points based on fear, are unnecessary and counterproductive.
Common Sense (Reason) rules in “Just Law”. There was good reason to quarantine her-—the case dismissed.
You can never eliminate Common Sense from a Justice System without creating chaos. Of course, all Leftists want chaos and have to destroy the legal system first to get it.
It is WHY we have to get back to true Justice and put SCOTUS members in prison for Treason and throwing our our “Justice (virtue) System” intentionally with many “unJust Laws”——which are oxymoronic and unconstitutional. Read my tagline. All Just Law HAS to promote virtue and be RATIONAL.
True.
But Ebola isn’t a laughing matter.
It did seem like our government was trying very very hard to create an outbreak here.
Christie refused to let her go home. Christie quarantined her immediately upon her arrival in the airport, and had her in a tent outside a hospital in Newark.
The home-based voluntary quarantine (which yes, she should have upheld - the bike ride was at the very least a tone-deaf gesture) was the compromise to END Christie's quarantine.
She got a friendly judge to rule on her side.
However, as you can see, Christie was not alone.
And in 1918 during the Great Influenza.
Quarantines work if they are used.
Reasonable guidelines (which she never objected to, by the way).
Ebola wasn’t dangerous. Gotchya. LOL
Of course she did by refusing to take blood tests.
The science is settled then...since the syptoms initally are flu-like (and the WHO screening symptom is simply a temperature above 99 degrees) we should always assume that it is the flu even though the patient spent months in an environment surrounded by ebola patients.
Andrew Cuomo and Pat Quinn say hello
We don’t know that.
Recently, it has been transmitted by recovered people via sex. A nurse who was “cured” is now in the ICU with it in critical condition. There is very little data on how it is transmitted, and some cases suggest it can be carried and passed with few symptoms.
Ebola is not some little sniffle.
Didn’t she break quarantine to go get a bowl of soup?
OK then, lets roll the dice even though the symptoms and nature of the disease in a dormant not evident state, is the exchange of fluids by sneezing viable to the recipient who may become infected?
Ever give blood??
I have, over 3 gallons...
O+, they call me
When you donate they ask have you been to XXX...
If yes, they say thanks but no thanks...
Uh Oh, lawsuit!!!
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