Dear NBC: Why does this woman still have a job?
First Dr. Nancy Snyderman endangered the public by defying a voluntary quarantine for possible Ebola exposure, apparently because she just couldn’t bear to be without her favorite soup. Now she eliminates all doubt about her trustworthiness and character—none to the first, not much of the latter— with a terrible, blame-shifting, non-apology apology:
“While under voluntary quarantine guidelines, which called for our team to avoid public contact for 21 days, members of our group violated those guidelines and understand that our quarantine is now mandatory until 21 days have passed. We remain healthy and our temperatures are normal. As a health professional I know that we have no symptoms and pose no risk to the public, but I am deeply sorry for the concerns this episode caused. We are thrilled that Ashoka is getting better and our thoughts continue to be with the thousands affected by Ebola whose stories we all went to cover.”
1. “Members” violated those guidelines? SHE did! The statement is deceitful and misleading.
2. “As a health professional I know that we have no symptoms and pose no risk to the public”—she can’t possibly know—yet—whether she and the rest of the exposed group pose a threat. And her conduct in this matter has been anything but professional.
3. Oh, she’s sorry for the “concerns.” She doesn’t apologize for sending someone who shared a car with her into a restaurant, risking the infection of large numbers of people, or violating the quarantine, or causing her group to have to be formally quarantined because she was too full of herself to eschew her favorite soup, or embarrassing the news media, NBC, and two professions: journalists and doctors. She’s just sorry all the uneducated hysterics out there got worried when she, the great Doctor Snyderman, just knows in her infinite expertise that silly precautions like quarantines don’t apply to her.
This episode certifies Snyderman as a fick, the Ethics Alarms designation for someone who is a mega-jerk and wants everyone to know it. As for the yecch-worthy apology, it ranks at the very bottom of the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale. It is a Category 10: “An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.”
Ethics Alarms 
Well, I mean Jack, everyone does it. Nobody’s perfect! It was just one mistake! And besides, it worked out for the best, it’s not like anyone got hurt. Plus, it’s not like they actually broke the law or anything, that quarantine was voluntary, and apparently they didn’t want to volunteer anymore, so they were really just complying with the rules. And how would you feel if you were denied soupy goodness just because you might be contagious? She was basically coerced, a slave to her own appetite. It’s frickin’ good soup. She’d do anything for it! Clinton would have done the same thing, I mean… we can’t sweat the small stuff. And if he wouldn’t care, why should we?
Besides, it’s not like she barfed Ebola directly into the soup. They probably had a sneeze guard or something. And if she hadn’t done it, you know someone else from her team would have, it’s probably a good thing that we got this loophole closed up now. Better late than never, right? These are unique times, so we have to expect small bumps in the road, right? Give her a break!
It’s complicated.
Seriously that should be like a game here. See how many of the predictable rationalizations you can chain together. I bet if Billy Reflex-Commentator saw his comment satirized before he even posted it, he’d think twice. Maybe even level up to Billy Thoughtful-Commentator.
That was a damn good start. At a recent seminar where I highlighted the rationalizations, the attendees started doing this too. In fact, everybody did it.
So… the stomach wants what the stomach wants?
The problem is when it decides it no longer wants what it already has.
(Sorry for the mental image, but I needed to say something silly after replying to comment in the abortion thread)
. It’s frickin’ good soup.
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Soup is easy to make.
Unless, you’re fecking stupid.
If people start coming down with Ebola because of her, she should be drawn and quartered. (There’s gotta be a way to do it legally!)
Why let her off the hook if moral luck saves her? What she did is just as bad whether it spreads Ebola or not.
True! I see that the story is still being carried by news services. She apparently has no remorse at all for having endangered an entire city. Apparently, the Privileged Few consider themselves above such plebian guidelines as voluntary quarantine. Maybe a little concertina wired enclosure out in the desert is more in order. I can do that. My Army training included how to segregate and secure POW’s in the field. It would carry over to this!
I see the problem not so much as endangering the city (which she is correct in saying is a minor risk), but in providing a terrible example to society. In health emergencies like this, the government relies on people to act responsibly. In Dallas, the people who lived in the apartment with Duncan were asked to voluntarily stay in the apartment. That had to become a forced, court ordered quarantine when they wouldn’t do it.
Dr. Nancy Snyderman is a very well-known physician. She should know the importance of people following quarantines and she should have been setting an example for the rest of us in how to handle possible exposure to ebola. Instead, she has reinforced the idea that you don’t REALLY have to stay quarantined. That all of this is completely unnecessary. So much for expecting anyone to voluntarily quarantine themselves now. Everyone possibly exposed will have to go into enforced quarantine, tying up resources and manpower. I would hope her state’s medical board would review such behavior and discipline her, but I doubt that will happen.
Excellent analysis. Bingo.
My thoughts exactly. Right or wrong about the medical facts, celebrity MD Snyderman blowing off the voluntary quarantine is inexcusable.
Compare this woman’s behavior with the brave nurse in Dallas who now has ebola but is improving thanks to good medical care.
What is so hard to understand about quarantine? Those help keep their family and friends and community safer. If she put herself and her crew at risk deliberately, they MUST go under quarantine. She could have done her ‘grave concern’ report in front of some other location. This just proves she should not even have a medical degree as she did harm.
I’m sorry that she’s sorry that she felt she had to apologize. Why should SHE have to be first to suffer the inconvenience of being quarantined?
Sorry – I am fresh from reading “Dear Little Thing.” I am absolutely “pro-choice” about quarantining myself, if I should happen to be found to have possible exposure to the Ebola virus.
Lucky, for once, we do not agree. There is a great deal of misinformation out there about ebola (and hemorrhagic fevers in general, such as Marberg). The first, and probably most important, is that we don’t really know what the vectors are for ebola, news media to the contrary. It is certainly spread by direct contact, but there have been cases of infection WITHOUT that direct contact, as well. In addition, in some cases the most strenuous precautions seem to be ineffective…witness Dallas. Further, ebola has a 70% kill-rate, and kills in something like 2 weeks…a horrible, painful death in which your internal organs dissolve. All that being said, if you have been exposed to ebola, there should be nothing “voluntary” about your quarantine, and it should be enforced on pain of death. Literally, the survival of the race (human) may depend on it.
. The first, and probably most important, is that we don’t really know what the vectors are for ebola, news media to the contrary. It is certainly spread by direct contact, but there have been cases of infection WITHOUT that direct contact, as well. In addition, in some cases the most strenuous precautions seem to be ineffective…witness Dallas. Further, ebola has a 70% kill-rate, and kills in something like 2 weeks…a horrible, painful death in which your internal organs dissolve. All that being said, if you have been exposed to ebola, there should be nothing “voluntary” about your quarantine, and it should be enforced on pain of death. Literally, the survival of the race (human) may depend on it.
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EXCELLENT comment and right on the money.
I keep hearing idiots in the media stating “Ebola is transferred just like AIDS, it is transferred by contact with bodily fluids.”
When was the last time you’ve seen AIDS workers dressed in Tyvek from head to toe?
Wake up, fools!
That an MD in this situation chose to violate protocol just to get her favorite soup is unforgivable.
Stupid bitch.
She is a disgrace.
I apologize dragin_dragon. I have been so full of sarcasm lately, I can barely manage to write anything that isn’t full of it. I was NOT being serious about being “pro-choice” about quarantining myself, if I knew I had Ebola. I was meaning to mock Nancy Fick Snyderman, M.D., while at the same time mocking the “Little Thing” message-to-no-one. Sorry I was unclear. I’d better just go silent for awhile, as in all truth (no sarcasm) I am rather ill.
Were I you, I would not admit that in public. Good luck, buddy.
What I don’t understand is why she didn’t just send somebody not exposed out to get her soup and leave it outside her door?
Why did she have to go out at all?
Oh, that’s right, rules are not for a woman of her stature.