Why blame TB traveler if he didn't break laws?

The irony is that Speaker is a lawyer, his father is a lawyer, and his father-in-law works at the CDC in the TB unit.   If anyone knows their way around the law and TB, it is Andrew Speaker.  For him to have decided he was not breaking any criminal laws, that he was not walking into a civil lawsuit, and that he was not running afoul of the CDC means he was probably well-informed and used excellent deductive reasoning to get home safely and save his life.

To those who say otherwise, I ask what proof they have that he a) broke a law; b) infected anyone; c) risked anyone’s life; d) acted immorally; e) was contagious?

I wonder whether in the thicket of information and misinformation, he didn’t act reasonably under all the facts and circumstances, as he knew them to be at the time.

As it turns out, he wanted the treatment, was not trying to elude authorities, is horrified to think he put anyone else at risk, or subjected anyone to the panic and alarm that has been his daily fare for weeks.   While many say his apology rings hollow and falls on deaf ears, I say in the absence of clear information that he was highly contagious, a carrier of a deadly communicable disease, a walking “Typhoid Mary,” he was smart to get himself home and not be stymied by information that was less than clear, at best.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am not advocating that one risk the lives of others to save oneself.   Nor do I applaud careless, reckless, thoughtless or selfish behavior.  I am a firm believer in the big picture, and looking out for the greater good.   I just don’t believe that in Speaker’s case, he really believed he was a public health threat.  I believe he knew he had to get himself home, and he had to do it any way he could.   His government was not going to help him, Italy could not cure him, and instead of being bullied by conflicting information, he chose to think for himself, logically, legally, and carefully, with the advice and counsel of his lawyer father and CDC father-in-law.  

If in the end, he was not contagious, did not put anyone’s life at risk, and did the right thing by getting home, many of you still might say, lucky for him that it turned out that way, but what he did was still wrong.   In other words, don’t let a happy ending justify a morally messy means.  On the other hand, if he was contagious, and other people do become ill, I would argue no one, most of all Speaker, really understood the situation he was in because he was not forbidden to travel.   He felt perfectly healthy, had no symptoms, and had been working full time and running.  His CDC father-in-law let his daughter marry him and travel with him.   He was with his wife’s 8-year-old daughter.  If he was public enemy number one, no one made that clear to him.

I don’t believe Speaker is the selfish kind of person he is painted to be.   I think he thought it was okay to go, refused to be stranded there, got himself home and turned himself in, and wants to live a normal healthy life after successful medical intervention.   Too bad it turned out this way for him, but the country has learned a valuable lesson.

While we are prepared on paper to handle medical outbreaks, we don’t really know how to carry out quarantine and isolation.   The laws of quarantine and public health are untested and unclear, the procedures unfamiliar.  Now we know.  If we don’t learn from this, shame on us.  

As for Andrew Speaker, hopefully, he will recover from his bout with TB.  And hopefully, he will recover from his bout with the media.

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