Tamron Hall calls out Kate Snow for a misleading report
The death of Thomas Eric Duncan is a failure of the American healthcare system. The media is tip toeing around the likely reasons he was not given the care any human being deserved.
Minorities and the uninsured are well aware of the treatment that they get in emergency rooms. They are generally dispatched as quickly as possible with minimal care. Even as one that has always had healthcare insurance, I have experienced inordinate treatment and lack of healthcare professionalism personally more times than I care to remember.
Kate Snow attempted give the impression that all those that have survived Ebola after being flown to the US survived simply because they got care in a timely manner while Thomas Eric Duncan did not. The reality is that NBC journalist Ashoka Mukpo‘s timeline for seeking care for his Ebola diagnoses was comparable to Thomas Eric Duncan’s. He got real care. Duncan was sent home with antibiotics. Every doctor and nurse knows antibiotics are useless to treat viruses but it gets a patient out of the emergency room with a semblance of care being provided.
Kate Snow’s statement was patently false. It is however an attempt in the media to disguise the reality of disproportionate access to healthcare and treatment by for profit healthcare.
Yesterday Grace Ji-Sun Kim and the Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote a blog post one should read. They said the following.
Duncan’s case raises an ethical and moral question: Who gets treatment and why? The two American missionaries who contracted Ebola in West Africa were given access to an experimental drug cocktail called ZMapp. The drug has immune-boosting monoclonal antibodies that were extracted from mice exposed to Ebola DNA. This drug is not provided for the thousands of Africans who have the Ebola virus, including those who have died and might have been saved if given the experimental drug.Duncan is not being treated with the medication.
Tamron Hall set the record straight as Kate Snow parroted the false narrative. It is important that Thomas Eric Duncan’s death be used to illustrate the in-humaneness about the American for profit healthcare system.