Centers for Disease Control and prevention Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, left, testifies before a Senate subcommittee hearing on the threat posed by a patient with drug-resistant tuberculosis. With Gerberding on Wednesday were Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the National Institute of Health, and Deborah Spero, deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Washington ? The globe-trotting tuberculosis patient moved up his flight to Europe after health officials urged him to stay put – but the Atlanta lawyer, in defiant testimony from his hospital room Wednesday, insisted he wasn’t ducking anyone.

“I didn’t go running off or hide from people. It’s a complete fallacy, it’s a lie,” Andrew Speaker told a Senate subcommittee by telephone from the Denver hospital where he remains in government-ordered isolation with an exceptionally dangerous form of TB.

But U.S. doctors painted a picture of a man on the run from the start, revealing that Speaker left for his wedding and honeymoon two days earlier than planned – and saying they were blocked by Georgia law from stopping him and thus preventing what turned into an international health scare.

Then when Speaker turned up in Rome, the government hesitated to ask Italian authorities to quarantine him in favor of offering him a second chance to cooperate. Instead, Speaker fled, slipping back across a U.S. border that was supposed to be closed to him when a border agent disregarded instructions and waved him through.

“We gave the patient the benefit of the doubt, and in retrospect we made a mistake,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in highlighting that “we failed to take the aggressive actions we could have.”

Authority lacking

If anything, Wednesday’s sparring before Congress raised new questions about government authority to intervene before someone with an airborne infection can endanger others. Gerberding called for more authority for states to restrict such patients’ movements.

On May 10, Fulton County, Ga., officials told Speaker he had a drug-resistant form of TB and that, “No, you should not travel,” testified health department chief Dr. Steven Katkowsky. “Was he ordered not to travel? The answer to that was no. The local health department does not have the authority to prohibit or order somebody not to travel.”

Speaker would have had to demonstrate he was a danger before the county could get a court order restricting his movements, Katkowsky said.

In a tape recording made by Speaker’s father, Ted, also a lawyer, and played on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Wednesday night, the patient asks Fulton County health officials about what sort of accommodations he would face at the hospital.

“Now that I don’t know,” said Dr. Eric Benning, medical director of the county health department, “but because of the fact that you actually are not contagious, there’s no reason for you to be sequestered.”

At another point, Benning is heard saying, “As far as we can tell, you are not a threat to anybody right now.”

Speaker said on CNN that the fact that his disease was drug-resistant, which he learned before his travels, didn’t “make me any more contagious.”

Changes under way

CDC laboratory testing didn’t conclude until May 22 that Speaker actually had the rare and particularly dangerous “extensively drug resistant” form of TB, one untreatable by most medications. Then the agency tracked him down in Rome – only to encounter what Gerberding called a major gap in public health defense: The CDC couldn’t find an airplane with the separate air ventilation required to transport Speaker home without endangering the pilot. While officials debated options, Speaker was advised to hire a private jet – which he said would cost $140,000 – or go to an Italian hospital. Instead, he boarded another commercial flight for home, via Canada.

The CDC has begun revamping its own leased aircraft to allow quarantine-style transport, Gerberding said.

The CDC did alert Homeland Security officials in time to put out an alert to border agents to detain him if he tried to re-enter the country. Instead, an agent identified Wednesday as an 18-year veteran, now on administrative leave, waved Speaker across the border. To prevent a similar incident, Homeland Security officials said Wednesday that new rules require officers to get a supervisor’s approval before they override such border warnings.

“I hope you’ll consider firing this person and anyone else involved,” said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., at a separate House hearing.