The outspoken Maine nurse kept in quarantine by Gov. Chris Christie after returning from West Africa, where she was treating Ebola patients, has blasted the New Jersey executive's vacillating opinions on vaccinations.
The Republican governor, questioned Monday during a trip to London about mandatory vaccinations amid a measles outbreak in the United States,
said parents should have "some measure of choice" in the matter.
He later amended the comments, with his office declaring the governor thinks there is "no question" children should be vaccinated for measles.
"I think this is a good example of Gov. Christie making some very ill-informed statements," Kaci Hickox said on MSNBC's
"All In With Chris Hayes."
"We heard it a lot during the Ebola discussion, and now it seems to have happened again."
The nurse added: "I think the unfortunate thing — or the scary thing — is that I want a leader who consults experts and thinks about all of the different sides to an issue before making statements and policies that are unfounded in science."
Last October, Christie
issued a policy that placed Hickox in an isolation tent after exhibiting an elevated temperature when she landed at New Jersey’s Newark airport – and was kept there for four days even though she tested negative for the virus.
Doctors said Hickox’s quarantine was unnecessary, as Ebola patients can only spread the disease while symptomatic,
Politico reported.
Hickox told MSNBC that Christie is "going against science."
"We know that vaccines are safe, and we know that vaccines save lives," she said. "I have worked in a measles outbreak in northern Nigeria before. We were seeing about 2,000 children a week with measles. And it’s a scary disease. I know that these families of these 100 people who have the disease now could tell you a little bit about what the disease looks like and how much misery it causes. After the vaccine was implemented in 1963, there was a large reduction in cases, about 98 percent."
Her comments echoed those she made in January to a group in South Portland, Maine, The Bangor Daily News reports.
"Politicians have decided they’re invincible, and that’s scary to me," she said, the newspaper reports. "Almost as scary as Ebola."
Maine is among 19 states that let parents opt out of vaccinating their children for philosophical reasons;
New Jersey does not.
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