Chris Christie defended his mandatory quarantine of health care workers returning from West African countries affected by Ebola Sunday, saying that the federal government will “eventually will come around to our point of view on this.”
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” the Republican New Jersey governor said that he couldn’t rely on a voluntary system of self-quarantining by aid workers to protect the health of New Jersey residents.
With New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Christie has imposed a mandatory 21-day quarantine on people who have been in contact with Ebola patients. The governors of Illinois and Florida have moved to implement similar policies.
The White House dispatched Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases, to push back against overreactions to Ebola on the Sunday talk shows.
Fauci warned that policies that inconvenience aid workers could have the unintended consequence of undermining efforts to contain Ebola.
“The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers. So, we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very uncomfortable for them to even volunteer to go,” Fauci said on Fox News.
But Christie rejected the idea that the quarantine policy would stop workers from traveling to Africa to fight Ebola.
“I believe that folks who want to take that step and are willing to volunteer also understand that it’s in their interest and the public health interest to have a 21-day period thereafter if they’ve been directed exposed to people with the virus,” Christie said.
