TB Andy Knowingly Put People At Risk

There's no other way to state it. You don't have to be an attorney who has "devoted his life to defending people who are seriously hurt and need help" to know what Andrew Speaker did was wrong.

By the time Andrew Speaker and his wife returned from Europe late last month, government officials and news reports had already branded him as a runaway tuberculosis patient who had deliberately evaded health officials and knowingly put other people at risk by traveling on crowded airplanes.

“This is what we’re hearing on the news when we land,” Mr. Speaker said on Thursday from his hospital room in Denver. He called The New York Times in response to repeated requests for an interview. “My wife and I look at each other, and I said, ‘They’re going for our throats here.’ ”

…

Mr. Speaker’s father, Theodore, also a lawyer, went so far as to record conversations with health officials, and to release selected excerpts from the recordings in which a doctor from the Fulton County Health Department in Georgia can be clearly heard saying, “you’re not contagious” and also “as far as we can tell you, you’re not a threat to anybody else right now.”

I don't think anyone has an issue with his flight from Atlanta to Paris, his time in Greece, or his travel to Rome. Whether it was a miscommunication or the health authorities actually told him he was not a risk, that part of the story is irrelevant. I think what people have a problem with, is the fact that he purposely avoided the no-fly list by booking a flight to Prague and then on to Canada, where he drove across the border.

In Rome, Mr. Speaker was notified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he had XDR TB and should not fly. At first, he said, an official told him that the C.D.C. would help him with travel plans. But a day later, he said, he was told that he would have to pay for a special medical evacuation that would probably cost $140,000, and that his name would be on a no-fly list. The official urged him to turn himself in to Italian health authorities.

But Mr. Speaker said he believed that his best and perhaps only hope for a cure was to get to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, which has expertise treating this kind of TB. Fearing that he might be quarantined indefinitely in Italy, he and his wife, Sarah, avoided the no-fly list by booking a flight to Canada and then driving into the United States, where a border guard ignored an alert triggered by Mr. Speaker’s passport.

At that time, he was notified that he posed a danger to others. At that time, he knew it was dangerous for him to fly. At that time, he knowingly evaded health officials and put an untold number of people at risk.

He knew the risks, he knew the consequences. Tell me, Mr. Speaker, who else should we blame?

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