Little Lives, Narrow Minds, Bitter tongues: Kaci Hickox and the Schadenfreude of a Nation
Kaci Hickox, MSF Nurse
There’s an interesting online drama being played out on a Dallas Morning News post.
Ms. Kaci Hickox, a volunteer nurse who only just returned from spending a month treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, is stopped at the airport in New Jersey. She is held (against her will) at the airport for 4 hours, interrogated, told she had a fever (when she didn’t). Then she’s transported to a NJ hospital, and shoved in a tent. She has no idea when she’ll be given her freedom.
She wrote about her experience on her post: UTA grad isolated at New Jersey hospital as part of Ebola quarantine
What I’d like you to do is read the comments. Some are kind, thank her for her work, and attempt to be supportive, but most read like this:
OnlyDespairNow
This self-indulgent, irresponsible woman is getting the treatment that she deserves.Max
We’re supposed to feel sorry for you because you were not allowed to go out and infect everyone else you came into contact you????Shut up and stop whining.
Jane Dawson
Her charity work is evidentally conditional . She regrets the variable downside of her charity.
And Christ never promised us happiness or fortune on earth just because we might give of ourselves here on earth. IOW,
Charity comes with a risk.Dawn McColm
So Ms. Hickox witnesses the horrors of ebola in Africa and the extreme suffering of those infected, and she whines about not being treated like a princess here. Sorry, but it’s time for her to grow up.Ewe Boreme-Sheep
Oh, grow up.57nomad
She could have been denied a visa to enter the US and spent her quarantine time in Africa. Maybe she would have been treated more politely there.Linda Bence
If Ms Hickox doesn’t like the treatment here, she is very welcome to go back to Africa and STAY THERE!
This is just a small sampling.
Not only are many of the comments callous and insulting, but the projections onto her (of expectations of a ticker tape parade, that she be treated like a princess, etc.) are ludicrous and show a venom, a bitterness that verges on the pathological.
So, here’s my theory about what is happening with these people:
1. They suffer from a spectacular lack of imagination. Their inability to imagine how, after returning what must have been a pretty traumatic month treating ebola patients, and 20 hours of transit, she’s treated like a criminal, told she has a fever, and given no clear information as to what is going on. She flew home, thinking she was coming to a place of safety, and got this.
2. A lot of them are terminally ignorant about the rights of US citizens to return, about due process, about questionably legal detention.
3. They are rabidly defensive of their own inaction, cowardice and lack of caring. They suffer from a strange bitterness over her temerity to go and do something they couldn’t contemplate.
4. They don’t have the intelligence to understand how, if the disease grows, it WILL come to the US, people will hide where they have been, and they will sicken and become infectious IN the community and hide it for fear of being treated like this woman was treated.
5. There’s a strange undercurrent of blind hatred for the scientific, the educated, the rational.
I suppose there was always a proportion of the population who has suffered from this weird combination of rage, self-righteous smugness, parochialism and schadenfreude. They just didn’t get to air it so widely before.
N.B This blog is MINE. I’m not a news organization and I am under NO obligation to house toxic comments on it. You are welcome to disagree with my posts but do so calmly, rationally and respectfully. If your comment shows disrespect for medical workers who have risked their lives to bring this outbreak under control at its source – something that most of us would not find the courage to do – I will simply trash it. Don’t like it? Go troll some other part of the internet.
I’m bothered by the fact that some people commented on her service and those who are medical professionals as though their duty is to the patient and they have no rights to personhood. I lose my ability to make decisions because “greater good” and my supposed “duty” as a nurse. It doesn’t matter if I took proper precautions to protect myself, if I’m possibly contagious (without medical evidence to suggest I am) I lose my rights. Feel free to hold me, but explain why. Expect me because of my profession instead of treating me like I don’t matter. Those who help deserve better than the contempt these nurses and doctors are getting.
Maybe my issue here goes beyond just this into how nurses are treated in general. The general disregard for those with some authority is ridiculously. Yes, some don’t deserve respect, but the vast majority do.
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Well said, Cara.
My worst fear is this: Not only did this woman return to a chaotic, frightening experience for absolutely NO reason, but as you say, the ease with which people, including the Governor of the State of NY, are so eager to blame the very people who are standing there, doing the work, and keeping this disease from turning into an explosive pandemic, is hideous. Truly hideous.
Are these people nuts? Are they suicidal? Because by all accounts, West Africa needs 14,000 medical professionals to get on top of this outbreak and bring it under control. And this woman’s experience has just convinced a significant number of US health professionals not to go an be part of the fight. And that will ultimately endanger us far more than a lack of quarantine.
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The comments on the original article are just awful; gratuitous nastiness. They’ve added, as an insult, that Kaci is employed by the CDC, in their “media propaganda” department.
Her story is the lead on the BBC Radio 4 news this morning.
A toxic mixture of fear, paranoia, ignorance and xenophobia brewing a moral panic. And this in a country where many believe absolutely in creationism and many are “birthers”. If that really represents the thought processes of many, their response is unsurprising.
A country to which the rest of us are supposed to look up, one that—we’re told—leads the free world.
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Clearly not in compassion.
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Morons and hypocrites who mix unrelated topics to make irrational points are themselves ignorant or at least grossly uninformed. The comments attributed to “BBC Radio 4 news” is in fact toxic and xenophobic. I am a scientist, I am objective and I am in fact a very analytically oriented man.Yes it is truly unfortunate that ebola has claimed so many innocent lives and yes we are indebted to those who are doing the utmost to make a difference through their efforts to treat those affected or develop an effective vaccine. Conversely, this crisis has been mishandled by public health officials and senior government leaders at every possible turn. The quarantine of “potentially infected” individuals regardless of how they may have been exposed to the ebola virus is a prudent and simple way to protect the public health. It should be obvious that politics should never be intertwined with matters of public health emergencies. Likewise, religion has nothing to do with ebola. It sounds to me as though the illustrious BBC reporter has a lot to learn. Besides being wrong the reporter’s comments sound like stale old dribble being blabbed by talking heads on nonsensical TV programs like the “View”. I feel sorry for those like the BBC reporter and others making comments here that are ignorant about the basics of epidemiology and the lethality of the ebola virus.
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Hi, thanks for your considered comment.
I understand that it may be populist and expedient to put medical workers who have treated ebola patients into quarantine, since this seems to be by far the most common form of transmission in the West, where we don’t usually handle the very sick, or corpses at home.
My point was that a) if you decide on a quarantine policy, then make sure you’ve got humane conditions in place to accommodate these people BEFORE you implement it and b) there is a faction of the public, inhabiting the comments of news posts whose fear for their own safety is causing them to be truly nasty to those who HAVE had the courage to go and put themselves at risk to solve the problem at its source. Fear – blind and uninformed fear – has turned people into vile, narcissistic, unempathetic creatures.
By all means, have a quarantine – not a tent – but don’t vilify the people you feel the need to quarantine for populist rather than scientifically based reasons.
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Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. In addition to governmental mishandling from the onset of the ebola crisis that I touched upon yesterday I would add that our so called news outlets have contributed enormously to all of the misinformation and hysteria surrounding ebola. Thanks again.
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Jon, I don’t get the slam against BBC News. I listen and read BBC news daily and I didn’t hear or read any news report that could be considered “toxic” or “xenophobic.” In fact, before Maine’s bullying governor asked (and was denied) a court order to incarcerate Ms. Hickox, so many U.S. news sources were manifestly garbling the facts so badly or infecting their coverage with such hysterical nonsense about Ebola I had to turn to the BBC and Reuters to get a straight story.
BBC news coverage consistently is well-informed, thorough, and without partisan slant — unlike virtually every U.S. news organ in these dark days of corporate media oligopoly.
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I notice that no one has even thought should this become epidemic in this country, the ONLY way we will recover is by the treatment given by these healthcare workers. OUR lives depend on them. Let’s not piss in the well we need to drink from.
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You really think most people will be treated if this becomes an epidemic in the USA?
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I think it is NOT unreasonable to quarantine EVERYONE who comes from a country where the plague of Ebola is pandemic. I do think that manhandling her and chucking her into an unheated tent may constitute a violation of her right against cruel and unusual punishment — she is after all, not a criminal.
However, I’m afraid that due to the long incubation and unpredictable nature of this disease, and the fact that people as experienced and more experienced than she (the earlier doctors who were infected who were returned for treatment) we don’t know for certain that she could not be infected.
The evolving standards of managing incubation periods is unfortunate, but foreseeable in a situation like this. Unfortunately, the folk in NJ panicked, and mistreated Kaci. I don’t think that the people in Maine are doing the wrong thing. I think she’s angry because she has already been through an ordeal.
If she’d known that ALL medical personnel were subject to a 21 day ‘shelter in place’ home quarantine, she might have reacted less badly. (This is something which may be coming, if you look at what the US military has announced it will be doing)
I think that after the ordeal of all that death, 21 days (preferably compensated) where one can recover and maybe even get counseling via something like Skype… this is not a ridiculous idea. I have an idea about the compensation too. I challenge EVERY tech millionaire to donate 21 days of services/compensation as a REWARD for volunteering in hell… This would include a computer that allows one to communicate with family and friends and work, one which the person in question could keep if they turned out not to be infected (which will be most people).
What do you guys think? This is my rationale:
The disease is not easy to catch, but it is very difficult to treat. It’s imperative to avoid its spread. Home quarantine limits the number of people who could come in contact with an infected person.
Also, I don’t believe we can afford:
(a) to have it become endemic or epidemic here — we have a very poor public health infrastructure compared to ALL other first world countries.
(b) we cannot afford panic or hate crimes against people from countries where Ebola is endemic or returning health/infrastructure volunteers.
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I commend kaci Hickox on her work and care with Ebola patients. I think she was very selfless, noble, brave and caring. However, as a health care worker, giving up 21 days for a quarantine is not too much to ask. Be thoughtful to the people here in the US too. They are afraid as they have a right be. I realize they are over reacting and frightenend but the point is that if you are selfless enough to go over and help people in another country, be thoughtful enough to give your own people peace of mind. Politics and constitutional rights aside here, people are scared of what they don’t understand. I don’t agree with being treated badley by anyone but please understand kaci, people are afraid and they have a right to be. Because you have the training as a health care professional, you know and have dealt with people who afraid to die and in that hospital you console them, you take care of them, you let them know you’re doing everything in your power to make them well. Take that same initiative with the citizens who are afraid of Ebola. Relieve their fears by self isolating to show that you’re wiiling to do what it takes to make them feel safer. If we cooperate and all have the same protocols in effect, we show a United front keep everyone safer and less afraid. God bless.
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Here’s the problem, Dawn: Kaci doesn’t HAVE ebola. AND – really, here’s what I notice people seem to find almost impossible to process – PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT SYMPTOMATIC CANNOT PASS ON THE DISEASE. If they could, the level of transmission of Ebola in the affected countries would be thousands of times higher than it is.
People who have been battling and researching this disease for decades KNOW EXACTLY how it is transmitted. So this is an issue of you, and many like you, simply refusing to listen VERY KNOWLEDGEABLE AND EXPERIENCED expertise on this subject. I think this may be a function of how little respect or trust Americans have in foreign expertise or in science, which your culture has spent the last 20 years denying.
I’d respect your stance a lot more if you’d just admit you don’t care about facts or experience, you just want to feel safer, regardless of whether your sense of safety is bought at the expense of rational thought or the rights of others. Do we forcefully imprison people based on your TOTALLY UNFOUNDED FEAR? Just to make you more comfortable?
I guess, for you, the answer is yes.
I find it so ironic that so many people talk about Africa and Africans and all their superstitions and how this contributes to the spread of disease. A lot of Americans are suffering under the superstition that Ebola can be caught off a subway pole by someone who is asymptomatic. And your politicians are using that fear to manipulate you.
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It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have Ebola. This isn’t personal and it’s not about her freedom or hysteria. It’s about common sense and an abundance of caution. Infection control is HARD. As a nurse and former first responder, I’m exactly aware how complicated it can be and how easily blood barriers can be broken even when you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.
It used to be done to quarantine people until they were sure they were not infectious. You don’t quarantine the sick as a precaution, you isolate and treat them.
I think there’s a fairness to quarantining EVERYONE who’s been in direct contact with sick and dying people shedding virus at a high rate. I certainly do NOT want such people in a hospital treating patients.
Most will not be infected, but a few will, and preventing them from going around and potentially sickening others is not a bad ideas.
Dr. Spencer in NYC was sick and I think that he should have been quarantined. Why? Because not everyone who comes into the country from an affected area is trustworthy. He came in when he realized he was sick, but if he hadn’t been a doctor (like the man in Texas wasn’t) he might not have even gotten treatment right away.
ALSO: you can subvert the fever by something as simple as taking Tylenol… So if you have ‘something important (to you) to do (an important wedding, funeral or conference) and you don’t want to cooperate… (African weddings can have a thousand guests, all closely packed, sweating all over each other as they celebrate by dancing. Great fun, if no one is shedding virus)
Or if you’re a zealot who wants to infect people, you could conceivably know you’re getting sick and take tylenol to keep your fever at bay and not tell anyone until it’s too late.
21 days in quarantine and even if you had successfully hidden your fever, you’d be showing other symptoms by then — symptoms that are impossible to hide.
Quarantine isn’t for the ‘Kacis’ of the world, it’s for the other people who either want to hurt others or are too scared or selfish to admit that they’re getting sick. Fairness dictates that everyone be treated the same… including Kaci.
She’s someone I’d never want as a nurse btw… Nursing is about *more* than the science… People are emotional. Patients get scared. I think she lacks the emotional sensitivity to be a good nurse. People are terrified. She should get that and not be so concerned about her own rights when people are scared. Yes, people are scared about stuff that they shouldn’t be, but being belligerent (and I think she was) isn’t the right solution.
She did what she wanted and went and served and I’m grateful for her service… but it was her choice. The rules may be uncomfortable, but I don’t think they are unreasonable.
In the US, we have a *very* WEAK public health infrastructure – witness the witless way that the CDC has handled it and it only gets worse as you go down from there to state and local levels. The US cannot handle an outbreak.
Also, the science of Ebola is evolving. The science of treatment is in its infancy. We have nothing more than ‘supportive care’ to offer. There is NO cure. Please consider that.
It only takes ONE person who goes to the wrong places and shares their infected SWEAT, TEARS, semen, blood, mucus, feces or urine. Do you know how much fecal matter makes its way into the food stream? That’s why people get food borne illnesses.
Also, bear in mind that sick poor people with no insurance don’t go to doctors… they attempt to go to work. if you’ve ever seen a minimum wage employee with a bad cold who manages to infect his/her fellow workers, you know what I mean. When they finally get sick, they go to the Emergency room and sit cheek by jowl with people who are also immune compromised. If you appear to have a bad cold or vague symptoms and the Emergency department is busy, you’re not first on the list in the triage line. You could sit there for 12 hours! When seen, your nurse could go into the next room and see others… it was a miracle that the man in Texas did not infect more people.
No, you cannot get Ebola from a pole… unless the person is sick and their snot is on the pole and you rub it in your eye or touch it onto your lips… but you can get Ebola from someone who has some medical knowledge and who wants to stay hidden… We cannot afford to be trusting since people in Liberia have lied about having contact with Ebola sufferers because of fear of being ostracized or quarantined, and some people might be in denial/lying (like the man in Texas who helped the sick woman, then claimed he’d had no contact with anyone).
Making every POTENTIAL Ebola infected person go through quarantine IS a hardship, however, human beings are small and good at staying hidden… in a country as big as the US, people who have freedom of movement and aren’t monitored and *controlled* in their movements could easily vanish into the greater population. By the time they realize they have more than the flu, they could easily have infected people who have already moved on somewhere else.
I’m a nurse. I know quite a bit about infection prevention. I also know it’s not an exact science. If it were, there’d be far fewer ‘hospital acquired’ infections — in situations where nurses and other personnel *do* follow the rules. In countries where the rules often aren’t spelled out and PPE (personal protective equipment) isn’t always available, we simply have to be more cautious.
I like bike rides with my loved ones too. If Kaci had handled it differently, she might have been given permission to exercise in remote locations with her partner… and no one would have been riding behind them filming them.
I’m sorry to say it bluntly, but she knew what she was getting into when she volunteered. Her rights don’t trump the rights of others. Her WANT to be free doesn’t trump the public NEED to be safe. She doesn’t deserve special treatment.
ALL people in her situation should be quarantined *BECAUSE* THEY APPEAR WELL.
If they are sick, then they belong in hospital.
ALL *WELL* (potentially infected) PEOPLE RETURNING FROM COUNTRIES where Ebola is present, WHO’VE HAD patient or personal CONTACT SHOULD BE QUARANTINED. People who cannot prove they had no such contact should be quarantined.
NO EXCEPTIONS.
If we lived in a European country where there was a more robust public health system, I might have a different answer. Maybe.
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