No One’s Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There’s Nowhere Else to Turn by Kevin Hazzard

Book review by Christy Headrick

No One’s Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There’s Nowhere Else to Turn is the recounting of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the consequential emergency medivac of two American citizens who contracted the deadly virus.  Amidst government trepidation and public outcry, a small group of compassionate and brave people stepped forward to help bring the ill doctor and support tech to the U.S.A. for treatment.  

Hazzard talked to a myriad of people and wove their stories together in an exciting and emotional roller coaster of a tale.

The chapters are short and give the reader the feeling of being hurried along in the way the characters were swept up into the frightening and hectic historic events. Beginning with a doctor who served all over the world to fight infectious diseases, the reader lands with her in Africa, in the middle of an Ebola epidemic.  Through Hazzard’s words we feel the heat of the African air compounded by the oppressive and limiting PPE (personal protective equipment).  Readers watch through this doctor’s eyes the terror of seeing other health care workers develop symptoms and try to hold on to life until someone comes to bring them home. The call had already been put out for health care workers and aid agencies from any country to come and help stem the tide of illness that had spilled over three west African countries.  The world has been unresponsive to the need of those that continue to fight at ground zero are waning.  

Government officials and heads of charity organizations that were responsible for the American citizens now suffering with Ebola have been trying to find a transportation company that will bring them home.  This is where Phoenix Air comes in.  What began as a parts delivery company became a transport agency specializing in moving highly dangerous cargo including nuclear weapons and infectious patients.  The pilots and health workers of Phoenix Air had experience with different types of danger including inclement weather, near impossible descents into mountain terrain, evacuating patients from countries at war, but this would be the first time anyone would move a patient with Ebola from West Africa to the specialized space for high contagious disease at Emory in Georgia.

Although Phoenix Air had high tech and safety engineered the specialized plane they were going to fly, this would be the first true test of the equipment.  In addition to caring for a patient in a moving container, the doctor and nurse would have to don and doff several layers of PPE during the flight.  This process took twenty full minutes and if a step were missed, an item torn, or a detail overlooked, the entire crew could be exposed to a deadly virus.  Compounding the pressure everyone involved was feeling, when the media found out that the two sick people were going to be shipped home to the U.S., fear bubbled over and the public was inflamed.  Death threats were bandied about as if killing those trying to help would cure the virus.  

What the public didn’t understand (or was slow to learn) was that the people transporting the patients were authorities at what they did, and that the team that would be treating them were highly trained experts in the field of medicine, especially for contagious diseases.  Both Americans that were shipped home at that time did live, which they absolutely would not have had they remained in West Africa. I would highly recommend this non-fiction book.  It was gripping and fast paced.