Which is all we’ve been trying to convey this whole time! He decided he wanted to take the chance, the others who were on those planes with him, and in the places where he stopped while driving, had no say in the matter. That, and the fact he did an end run around a no fly order make him an asshat.
The press release I linked to says essentially as much.
Though it seems that it was not the CDC that initially spoke with him, from what the head of the CDC said. It seems to be more initially like the case of the guy in Arizona (where it was all state, and not the CDC that was involved), where state medical authorities said, “You have TB, you seem to be mostly okay, but don’t go nowhere, all right?”
Then the guy flew to Europe anyway, the pending tests for the drug-resistant strain came back positive, and the CDC got involved. They then said, “Hey, this is some heavy shit…we better be really sure this guy isn’t gonna infect planeloads of innocent people!”, so they told him to stay put and go into quarantine until they could come get him and check him themselves to see whether or not he was contagious.
THEN the asshat ignored the CDC and flew to Canada, causing the CDC to call the press conference to try and find his fellow passengers, just in case he WAS contagious and had just given several hundred people a mostly-fatal disease. But it turns out he was still mostly okay, after he was quarantined in the US and they ran some tests on him.
Look at it this way. He has heard multiple times that he isn’t contagious, and might feel as though the CDC wouldn’t take a risk unless it was zero. He feels, based on what his doctors have told him, that his chances of spreading the disease are close enough to zero that it is worth the risk to get to the only facility that will give him a shot. (Not that he had to get there immediately, but that he’d never get there if he stayed in Italy).
Yes, but that wasn’t his risk to take. That’s why the CDC exists in the first place, because while this time it turned out okay, pandemics are caused by people with this guy’s exact thought processes.
He claims that they told him they would not provide a private jet, at which point he asked if he could take a military flight, which they refused. He felt as though he was being hung out to dry, and that he couldn’t raise the money for a private jet. I do believe him on those points, but I don’t expect everyone will.
I think we’re essentially in agreement over the facts, but I differ on whether or not the risk was worth taking. The argument on your risk vs. others happened upthread, and I don’t feel up to taking it on tonight.
Wait, are Pit threads allowed to end on a happy, peaceful, agree-to-disagree note?
Stranger things have happened, I guess. 
I think they pit you for it.
Quick, call me a poopie-head and I’ll call you a dum-dum face! It may be our only chance!
I see you are a guest. I hope they institute a sliding scale for assholes, and charge you about 10 times the going rate if you really sign up. You pick the least important part of any post and respond to that. You still think you are the defender of the faith, but you are just another mouth making random noise.
You do realize that if he had not flown in the first place he would not have been in the position to be “hung out to dry.”
p.s. keep talking, I am sure you will soon be known by a new nick, The Squirminator.
Or we could end the thread that way…
How about we go back to the little nugget VC03 mentioned? Because this seems to me to be the biggest fuck-up going. Humans are fallible creatures, and it’s not unexpected that in times of stress they make poor judgements, which is why procedures for dealing with life-threatening situations tend to be big on checklists, independent reviews and other FUBAR-eliminating steps. One of which is a clever warning process whereby the people controlling access to planes get a big alert saying “Don’t let this guy on a plane, he may have DeathCooties! Put on moonsuit, detain him and call plague control!”. How dumb do you have to be to let that one pass by?
Let’s just hope that the procedure works a bit better for any hypothetical Ebola Eric, SARS Sam or Avian Flu Annie who might want to get on a packed jumbo in future…
Wasn’t it a fellow working on this side of the USA/Canada border who got the computer warning and waved Speaker through “because he didn’t look sick”? 
Yup.
I’m starting to think the reason Avian Flu hasn’t actually ravaged us all yet is because the virus is disappointed that there’d be no challenge in it any more.
Hello, Pot…
delurks
Speaker was and is capable of spreading TB. He is, in fact, contagious.
Per DR. JULIE DR. GERBERDING, DIRECTOR, CDC:
Cite.
Before and after his XDR-TB diagnosis, Speaker tested smear negative. The doctors at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver call this “relatively non-contagious.” Cite .
Speaker and his retinue insist that “relatively non-contagious” equals “non-contagious,” which has apparently convinced the scientifically illiterate newspaper editors who choose headlines. See the headline for the above cite. Per the CDC quote above, 17% percent of known TB transmissions are from carriers who are “relatively non-contagious.”
Once more, with feeling:
Speaker is smear negative. Speaker is not non-contagious. He was and is contagious.
The question is whether or not he is contagious to people he is sitting next to. I would be interested to see how many of those 17% were transmitted via kissing, or another type of bodily fluid exchange.
By the way, I like your user name a lot.
Since that isolation order was rescinded, is he now non-infectious? Or, is he still infectious, but they’ve just decided to grant him a little more leeway WRT his movements?
The other thing I found interesting was the Doctor’s statement that he had broken no laws. I figured he would have broken a law when he entered the country.