Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Friday businesses should open across the country with safety measures, asserting a vaccine for COVID-19 shouldn’t control the reopening timeline.
“View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked the Republican ex-governor about his commentary in The Washington Post, in which he called for the start of reopening.
He wrote additional lives would be lost “as a result of reopening our country,” but argued that continued strict shutdowns would cause mass economic strife, spurring unemployment, spikes in domestic violence and other consequences.
During the Friday interview, Goldberg asked "who" Christie is sacrificing in has own family to the ongoing pandemic. But Christie replied that this was a “false choice.”
“What I said was that lives are going to be lost inevitably in this, no matter what we do,” he said. “Lives are being lost today after we’ve been shut in for nine weeks. People are still dying every day from this virus.”
“I said that some Americans will make that sacrifice no matter what we do, and now we have to decide how we’re going to balance this, and the balance is that there are people who are standing on food bank lines, people who are losing their homes, people who are losing their livelihoods, which is leading to depression, which is leading to suicide, which is leading to drug addiction, which is leading to domestic violence,” he continued.
Christie said he supports businesses opening at 50 percent capacity, all people wearing masks and temperatures being taken before people enter businesses.
“If we allow the virus to control when we reopen, we will not reopen until there’s a vaccine,” he added.
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