Fear-mongering and ignorance drove states to force health workers into quarantine when they returned from fighting Ebola in West Africa, and the restrictions were probably unconstitutional, according to a new report issued Tuesday, NBC News reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership said in a joint report no one has kept statistics on how many people were put into quarantine across the United States.
But virtually all of them were unnecessarily kept at home, endangering their jobs, disrupting their private lives and damaging efforts to fight the epidemic, the strongly worded report says.
"Our leaders were enabled by a fear-mongering mass media that also ignored established medical science, further stoking panic and compounding an already immense public disservice," Dr. Deane Marchbein, president of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières USA, wrote in an introduction to the report.
