New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) on Sunday defended his state's mandatory Ebola quarantine policy, saying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would "eventually come around to our point of view on this."
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Christie said the CDC's Ebola protocols have to date been a "moving target." And he rejected the assertion that mandatory quarantines may do more harm than good, saying the risk to public health was too great to take any chances.
"I don't believe when you're dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system," he said.
Meanwhile, a top official with the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned on the same program that mandatory quarantines for health care workers returning from West Africa would frighten others from wanting to head abroad to address the crisis at its root.
"The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers," he said. "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." --Jon Terbush