Civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel has defended countless victims of government abuse over the years, including people swept up in another hysterical call for health quarantines during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
But even the grizzled Siegel has been struck by the bravery and eloquence of Kaci Hickox, the 33-year-old nurse who telephoned him Saturday from a makeshift tent on the grounds of a New Jersey hospital to seek his legal help.
“She’s terrific, and she knows exactly what her rights are and she explains it all clearly,” Siegel said after visiting Hickox Sunday at the isolation unit where she’d been confined by Gov. Chris Christie.
Hickox was refusing to submit to a mandatory 21-day quarantine first decreed on Friday by Christie and our own Gov. Cuomo for all health care workers returning from West Africa through Port Authority airports.
After risking her life with the group Doctors Without Borders to treat Ebola patients in Guinea, the last thing Hickox expected when she landed at Newark Airport was to be “treated like a criminal” in her own country, she said.
Doctors Without Borders, after all, has more experience fighting Ebola than any government or organization. The group’s leadership immediately objected to the “blanket forced quarantine,” saying “such a measure is not based upon established medical science.”
The most respected medical publication in the country, the New England Journal of Medicine, called the policy “unfair and unwise” and warned it would dissuade health workers from volunteering to fight the Ebola epidemic in Africa.
“The governors’ action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: It gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial,” the medical journal said.
As for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it keeps urging monitoring measures that don’t include quarantines for people who show no symptoms of illness.
None of this mattered to “Sit Down and Shut Up” Christie, though he avoided a legal suit by Siegel by allowing Hickox to travel home to Maine.
Cuomo seems a bit more sympathetic. The 21-day quarantine could be served at home, Cuomo said Sunday, but it would still be mandatory.
“You better be home when they (health officials) come (to check),” Cuomo said. “If you’re not home, then you violated the quarantine.”
Some 30 health workers a day are arriving at Kennedy Airport from West Africa, Cuomo told The News earlier this week, so the number facing mandatory home quarantine could grow rapidly.
His office did not respond, however, to repeated requests from The News seeking the number of returning health care workers who have already been subjected to the governor’s policy.
Gov. Cuomo, how many people have been quarantined?
Meanwhile, other governors have taken to ignoring the science and making up their own quarantine rules. They include Paul LePage, the Republican governor in Hickox’s home state of Maine who is facing a desperate fight for reelection on Tuesday.
LePage keeps trying to keep Hickox quarantined in the home she shares there with her boyfriend.
The couple responded by taking a one-mile bike ride Thursday morning.
They chose the bike ride, Siegel said, because they could challenge the quarantine without upsetting local residents by entering some public spot.
LePage threatened to go to court to enforce his quarantine. Hickox welcomes the chance to have any of these governors — LePage, Christie or Cuomo — explain why they’re taking away rights of medical workers trying to fight the Ebola epidemic.
“You can’t give the government the power to violate the Constitution for a minute, let alone 21 days,” said Siegel, the lawyer who has seen this movie before.
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