Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino says Gov. Andrew Cuomo should order Health Commissioner Howard Zucker to shut down gates at JFK International Airport to stop any traveler from the three West African nations most affected by the epidemic — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Astorino also thinks everyone else on those flights, regardless of their point of origin or citizenship, should be turned back.

The candidate, who was briefly joined on the call by Rep. Peter King, said Cuomo seemed to view the Ebola crisis as “a nuisance during his book tour.”

Astorino has been calling on the Port Authority to shut down all flights from the three West African nations. On Thursday, the Port Authority’s Executive Director Patrick Foye noted that there are no direct flights from those nations into the metropolitan area. (In fact, there are currently no direct flights from those three into any part of the U.S.) Most travelers from that region, Foye noted, arrive in the U.S. via Paris or Brussels.

“It has to be dealt with in a severe and serious way immediately,” Astorino said of the possibility that Ebola will arrive in New York.

As to how this shutdown should be accomplished, Astorino initially said that passengers from the affected nations should be turned away, and later expanded that to say that everyone on the flight — including, conceivably, American citizens returning from Parisian vacations — should be returned to its point of origin rather than risk the possibility that they became infected by being on the same plane.

This cordon sanitaire would, of course, require the entire planeload of passengers to spend another six hours in close quarters with the suspect West African citizen.

Ebola can only be contracted through direct contact with bodily fluids.

Astorino said that he would be willing to test the question of whether the state has the right to turn away international flights in court.