Health Care / Medicine

Ebola Is So Scary It's A Crime To Have It

Ebola hysteria obscures regular crazy.

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As you can probably imagine, I’ve been watching white people freak out about Ebola with a mixture of amusement and sadness. This thing has been for decades, menacing discrete pockets of black people on a continent nobody cares about without garnering the heath and safety attention Americans spend worrying about second hand smoke or sugary pop sodas. But now a few white doctors get it and we’re all living through a Steven Soderbergh movie. That’s funny to me, also tragic.

Don’t worry, we’re probably only a few dead white people away from curing this thing, and then going to Canada to afford the medicine.

In the meantime, expect some civil liberties to get crushed. Earlier this month, Tamara Tabo used her space to say that people who want abortions are treated no worse than people who are carrying a deadly infectious disease. Or something. I tend to think that people who want to control their own bodies should be treated much better than Ebola patients. But, then again, the treatment of people suspected of having Ebola is already pretty low. Hell, people who just say they have Ebola are being charged with crimes…

There was a very disturbing story last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (gavel bang: ABA Journal).

A man, Harry Randall Withers, was arrested for drunk driving, a misdemeanor. While jailed, the man claimed he had symptoms of Ebola after his recent trip to Liberia. Hysteria, craziness, the prison stopped accepting new inmates, yada yada.

Turns out that the man didn’t have Ebola. In fact, he hadn’t been to Liberia and hadn’t traveled abroad since 2005. Withers was indicted on three felony counts of making false statements.

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Okay, I’m going to skip over the part where we live in a world where getting behind the wheel of a steel and glass cannonball, WHILE DRUNK is less serious than lying about being sick. Instead, I want everyone to take a look at Mr. Withers:

People, this man is crazy. I can’t say that he’s clinically nuts, I can’t say if he is entitled to a legal definition of diminished capacity… BUT LOOK AT HIM. So Mr. Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs Man lied about having Ebola. SO WHAT? For all we know, Money thinks he’s in Liberia RIGHT NOW. Don Quixote thought he was a damn knight. When we punished him for that, we called it the Inquisition.

This is what happens when you start incarcerating people based on hysteria, instead of harm. That the prison system overreacted to this guy is not Withers’s fault. He didn’t knock down a prison guard, spit in his mouth, and scream “You don’t know where I’ve been,” like his name was Tyler Durden. Even if he’s not crazy, he’s a guy who got busted and said some crazy things… and then the system acted crazily. He didn’t call in a bomb threat. He said that he was feeling sick. The fact that people reacted like he was a human dirty bomb is really not why we should be charging people with felonies.

God forbid he actually did have Ebola. The state would have destroyed any semblance of his civil rights or liberties. It’s amazing how quickly America is willing to ignore her most cherished principles once we’re afraid of something.

We don’t need fear to stop the spread of Ebola. We need science. And now that we have the political will to fund scientists, perhaps this thing will go away. In the meantime, let’s try to remember that shooting people who have not turned into zombies yet IS ILLEGAL, despite what the Walking Dead might have led you to believe.

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Cops: Inmate who falsely claimed Ebola risk hadn’t traveled [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
Arrested on misdemeanor, man now faces felony case over claimed false Ebola statements at jail [ABA Journal]

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