JetBlue flight briefly quarantined at JFK due to measles scare

Hope Schreiber
·Writer
NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 1: Passengers board a JetBlue Airways plane April 1, 2014 at John F Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
Passengers were detained aboard a JetBlue Airways plane at John F Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. (Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

A JetBlue flight that flew into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York was quarantined on Sunday evening due to what was thought to be a possible measles scare.

According to a statement provided by the airline to Yahoo Lifestyle, all passengers onboard the flight, originating from Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, were cleared by medical services and deplaned accordingly.

The statement read in full, "After reports of a potential medical concern onboard, flight 410 from Santo Domingo to JFK, was requested to hold for medical services out of an abundance of caution so a customer could be examined. All customers were cleared and the flight deplaned normally."

Officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey confirmed to FOX News that the passenger in question was previously vaccinated and cleared by the EMS.

“Some sort of medic type guy came on with a mask and a police man, probably Port Authority, with a mask looked at the kid and decided that it was probably mosquito bites,” a JetBlue passenger on the flight told WNBC.

One person, who shared footage of a medic wearing a mask on Twitter, said that the young boy was profiled due to being of the Orthodox Jew. "Checking a family on board is humiliating, violating & antisemitic! There is absolutely no reason to believe a Hasidic Jew is any more of a concern than anyone else aboard," the person shared.

"Negligence and antisemitic," the person wrote in a follow-up Tweet. "For the record, measles and mosquito bites have no resemblance."

Just last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released in a statement that measles cases in the U.S. are the highest they have been in 25 years after they were eliminated in 2000. Vaccination is the best way to protect against the highly contagious viral infection; there is no treatment to cure an established measles infection.

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