In Bizarre Op-Ed, Ebola Nurse Kaci Hickox Expresses Her Concern for Africans Dying from Ebola, and Her Contempt for Americans’ Right to be Protected from Plague

 

Kaci Hickox: she's morally superior to the rest of us, so basic public health precautions don't apply to her
 

Re-posted with running commentary by Nicholas Stix

Note that while the Dallas Morning News emphasizes Hickox’ education, in order to induce readers to submit to her purported authority, she writes in a style mixing hysterical emotionality—like a child who knows nothing of deadly pandemics—with arrogance towards basic public health precautions. It reads as if she were saying, between the lines, that her work with sub-Saharan Africans puts her morally above the rules required to protect American public health. She also clearly holds Americans and their health in contempt. Then again, she just returned from working for a Marxist and anti-Semitic medical group, Doctors Without Borders. And thus, I now bestow on her the title, Ebola Whore.
 

"FILE - In this Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014 file photo, a child stands near a sign advising of a quarantined home in an effort to combat the spread of the Ebola virus in Port Loko, Sierra Leone. More than 10,000 people have been infected with Ebola, according to figures released Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014 by the World Health Organization, as the outbreak continues to spread. Of those cases, 4,922 people have died."

[Oh, so officials in Sierra Leone have a right to quarantine people, in order to limit the outbreak, but we don't?]
 

UTA grad isolated at New Jersey hospital as part of Ebola quarantine
By Kaci Hickox
Published: 25 October 2014 12:00 P.M.
Updated: 25 October 2014 08:56 P.M.
Dallas Morning News

(Editor’s note: Kaci Hickox, a nurse with degrees from the University of Texas at Arlington and the Johns Hopkins University, has been caring for Ebola patients while on assignment with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone. Upon her return to the U.S. on Friday, she was placed in quarantine at a New Jersey hospital. She has tested negative in a preliminary test for Ebola, but the hospital says she will remain under mandatory quarantine for 21 days and will be monitored by public health officials. Dr. Seema Yasmin, a Dallas Morning News staff writer, worked with Hickox as a disease detective with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With Yasmin’s help, Hickox wrote this first-person piece exclusively for the News.)

I am a nurse who has just returned to the U.S. after working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone - an Ebola-affected country. I have been quarantined in New Jersey. This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me.

I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa.
I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.

[Hundreds of health care workers have already died in West Africa from Ebola. American health workers have brought Ebola to America. Other American health care workers have been infected with Ebola from caring for the lying, scheming Liberian, who brought it to this country.
Why does Hickox speak in such a selfish, contemptuous tone regarding American public health? Does she think she has a right to spread a plague in America? Why does she say she is “scared” for public health workers coming from the Ebola Zone? She doesn’t even sound believable. Her rhetorical reminds me of leftists who would say they are “scared” of what Republicans will do to the country. If she cared about public health, she would be scared of what an outbreak would do to Americans. And quarantine is a tried-and-true method for dealing with epidemics and pandemics much older than she is. Why would she fear quarantine?]

I arrived at the Newark Liberty International Airport around 1 p.m. on Friday, after a grueling two-day journey from Sierra Leone. [No one forced you to go there.] I walked up to the immigration official at the airport and was greeted with a big smile and a “hello.”

I told him that I have traveled from Sierra Leone and he replied, a little less enthusiastically: “No problem. They are probably going to ask you a few questions.”

He put on gloves and a mask and called someone. Then he escorted me to the quarantine office a few yards away. I was told to sit down.
Everyone that came out of the offices was hurrying from room to room in white protective coveralls, gloves, masks, and a disposable face shield.

One after another, people asked me questions. Some introduced themselves, some didn’t. One man who must have been an immigration officer because he was wearing a weapon belt that I could see protruding from his white coveralls barked questions at me as if I was a criminal.

[Should he not have taken his job seriously?]

Two other officials asked about my work in Sierra Leone. One of them was from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They scribbled notes in the margins of their form, a form that appeared to be inadequate for the many details they are collecting.

[Aren’t we being a bit petty?]

I was tired, hungry and confused, but I tried to remain calm. [She sounds like a petulant child, as if she were being terribly patient regarding the outrageous demands being made on her.] My temperature was taken using a forehead scanner and it read a temperature of 98. I was feeling physically healthy but emotionally exhausted.

Three hours passed. No one seemed to be in charge. No one would tell me what was going on or what would happen to me.
I called my family to let them know that I was OK. I was hungry and thirsty and asked for something to eat and drink. I was given a granola bar and some water. I wondered what I had done wrong.

[Again, with the emotional, ignorant tone. She doesn’t write like someone who works with a pandemic, or who has any experience as a health care worker. Is she adopting this tone, in order to bamboozle ignorant readers? I’m married to a veteran nurse, and I have worked as a nurse aide, and health care workers don’t talk like this. She sounds more like a difficult patient than a nurse.]

Four hours after I landed at the airport, an official approached me with a forehead scanner. My cheeks were flushed, I was upset at being held with no explanation. The scanner recorded my temperature as 101.

The female officer looked smug. “You have a fever now,” she said.

I explained that an oral thermometer would be more accurate and that the forehead scanner was recording an elevated temperature because I was flushed and upset.

I was left alone in the room for another three hours. At around 7 p.m., I was told that I must go to a local hospital. I asked for the name and address of the facility. I realized that information was only shared with me if I asked.

Eight police cars escorted me to the University Hospital in Newark. Sirens blared, lights flashed. Again, I wondered what I had done wrong.

[This was tiresome the first time she used this line; this is the third time.]

I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.

[And what should “the world” have done, Nurse Moral Superiority? And because you risked your life in the Ebola Zone, you now think you are above the rules of fighting epidemics and pandemics at home, and that we must submit to you, because our lives are less valuable than those of West Africans?]

At the hospital, I was escorted to a tent that sat outside of the building. The infectious disease and emergency department doctors took my temperature and other vitals and looked puzzled. “Your temperature is 98.6,” they said. “You don't have a fever but we were told you had a fever.”

After my temperature was recorded as 98.6 on the oral thermometer, the doctor decided to see what the forehead scanner records. It read 101. The doctor felts [sic] my neck and looked at the temperature again. “There’s no way you have a fever,” he said. “Your face is just flushed.”

My blood was taken and tested for Ebola. It came back negative.

I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?

[Enough already. If you weren’t willing to be quarantined, you had no business going to an area hit by a pandemic.]

I recalled my last night at the Ebola management center in Sierra Leone. I was called in at midnight because a 10-year-old girl was having seizures. I coaxed crushed tablets of Tylenol and an anti-seizure medicine into her mouth as her body jolted in the bed.

It was the hardest night of my life. I watched a young girl die in a tent, away from her family.

With few resources and no treatment for Ebola, we tried to offer our patients dignity and humanity in the face of their immense suffering.

[Then it should be obvious to you why you must be quarantined. Otherwise, you and your colleagues should not be permitted to return to America. It sounds to me like you think Americans have no right to live.]

The epidemic continues to ravage West Africa. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that as many as 15,000 people have died from Ebola. We need more health care workers to help fight the epidemic in West Africa. The U.S. must treat returning health care workers with dignity and humanity.

[America must do whatever is necessary to protect Americans from Ebola. Health care workers who are offended by the inconvenience, should refrain from heading to West Africa.]