Vanilla Ice stops, collaborates, tweets while trapped inside quarantined Emirates flight
A 500-person Emirates flight from Dubai was quarantined for hours at John F. Kennedy Airport on Wednesday morning after several passengers found a fever grabbing hold of them tightly. As news outlets tried to cull details from the abundance of ambulances and police cars encircling the plane, they went online for answers, where none other than Vanilla Ice rocked the tweets like a vandal.
The rapper (née Robert Van Winkle), who was sitting on the upper deck of the A380 plane, chronicled the situation live. “So I just landed from Dubai and now there is like tons of ambulances and fire trucks and police all over the place,” he tweeted. Later, he said that “apparently there is over 100 sick on the bottom floor” of the double-decker flight.
Thankfully, the early reports of more than 100 being ill was as overblown as Ice’s ‘90s pompadour. Though reports say that around 100 passengers confessed to feeling ill, the office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio reports that only 10 people were hospitalized, while an additional nine were ill but declined medical attention. Reports say the afflicted passengers were suffering from headaches, sore throats, coughing fits, and intense fevers. As one Twitter user shared, those on board the aircraft were asked to fill out a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention form and have their temperature taken when deplaning. Those showing no symptoms, including Ice, were eventually sent on their way.
Naturally, the possibility of Ice being at the center of a potential pandemic was enough to soften the anxiety of said pandemic, and the jokes came pouring in.
Early reports say the outbreak was possibly caused by a current flu outbreak in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, where some of the passengers had visited. Until a cause is revealed, we’re just gonna go ahead and blame a poisonous mushroom (deadly).