Some people have said that nurse Amber Vinson was careless for flying right before being diagnosed with Ebola. She begs to differ, and she took time to explain herself on the TODAY show.
“I’m an [Intensive Care Unit] nurse; I embrace protocol and guidelines and structure, because in my day-to-day nursing, it is a matter of life and death, and I respect that fact,” Vinson told TODAY on Thursday. “I would never go outside of guidelines or boundaries or something directly from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] telling me I can’t go [or] I can’t fly. I wouldn’t do it.”
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Vinson dismissed reports that claimed she’d reported feeling ill during her Ohio trip and contacted the CDC to say she was returning to Dallas, calling them “completely false.” She said she had been in contact with another health official who alerted her to potential symptoms.
It was only after her return, she said, that she realized that if her fellow Texas Health Presbyterian nurse, Nina Pham, had contracted the virus, Vinson would be just as vulnerable.
“That Sunday when I heard about my colleague, Nina, coming down with the virus, I was floored,” said Vinson, who was diagnosed with disease Oct. 15. “I was afraid for myself, for my family, because I did everything that I was instructed to do, every time, and I felt like, ‘If Nina can get it, any one of us could have gotten it.’”
Vinson was released on Oct. 28 from Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital.