Author of the forthcoming book Make America Healthy Again Dr. Nicole Saphier of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says the “right thing” for the United States to do amid the deadly coronavirus outbreak is to shut down all travel to and from China.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the State Department have advised Americans not to travel to China, and airlines have started canceling all flights to and from China to stop the spreading of the coronavirus. Six cases of the virus have been confirmed in the U.S. while the CDC monitors a number of suspected cases in various states.
Still, President Trump has yet to implement a travel ban to and from China. In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Fox News contributor Dr. Saphier said a travel ban is necessary given China’s inability to contain the coronavirus.
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“I hate seeing a large communist country restricting travel because that to me, it’s frustrating when the government tells you that you can or cannot do something,” Dr. Saphier said. “However, in this case, because they did such a poor job initially in containing the virus, the right thing to do is to stop people going in and out right now until we can have the next month or two without new transmissions happening.”
Dr. Saphier said she is concerned about the U.S. and other nations rushing to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the coronavirus — because quarantines are not reliable in containing viral viruses.
“The one thing that concerns me a little bit is we have the United States and we have all these other countries trying to bring out our citizens from [China] and bring them home or bring them somewhere else so that they’re no longer in Wuhan, but the thing is … we’re going to bring them somewhere else and we’re going to quarantine them, but the truth is, quarantines fail,” Dr. Saphier said.
“For the most part, a lot of these places — I think South Korea is doing self-quarantines — they’re just saying to the people, ‘You just have to stay in your house. You can’t go out for two weeks.’ We know what that does. We saw that with measles here in New York. People don’t follow rules,” Dr. Saphier continued. “When you tell them, ‘You can’t leave your house,’ they’re like, ‘Okay, we won’t. Oh, I just went to my neighbors. Oh I just went up to the store.’ Not that I want to leave Americans in China to deal with this, but again, it is a viral infection … and I don’t think we should be evacuating people out at this point. If the whole purpose is to contain, that’s not the way to do it.”
So far, the U.S. has evacuated about 200 American citizens from Wuhan and have quarantined them at the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California.
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have urged the Trump administration to immediately issue a travel ban to and from China to contain the coronavirus and stop its spreading in the U.S. — where six cases have been confirmed.
As Breitbart News has reported, China has the most foreign students in the U.S. compared to all other foreign countries with nearly half a million enrolled in American universities in 2018. Likewise, giant tech corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook employ thousands of Chinese-born employees who, like Chinese foreign students, take frequent trips back to China.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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