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ebola
We Should Fear More Than Ebola
While we should all fear and work to stop this outbreak, we should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation.
Jun 21, 2026
As Congo faces the world’s third-largest Ebola outbreak, treatment centers have been attacked, masks and boots are running out, and entire communities are left vulnerable amid ongoing conflict and international neglect. This disaster is possible due to centuries of exploitation that amplifies the spread. The trail of inhumanity and structural violence is very scary and needs to end.
History shows that this country has been ravaged by colonial violence and foreign profiteering. Under King Leopold II of Belgium, an estimated 10 million Congolese people were murdered, mutilated, and terrorized as rubber and ivory were extracted for enormous profit. As a matter of policy and to enforce quotas, colonizers cut off limbs and heads.
Congo was also plundered by the transatlantic slave trade, which kidnapped, displaced, and enslaved millions of Congolese people.
Later, global demand for diamonds, gold, coltan, and other conflict minerals remade the region into a site of ongoing wars and labor exploitation. Much of this extraction still occurs through artisanal mining, a form of labor whereby individuals risk their lives to extract these valuable and raw natural resources under dangerous conditions.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence.
Cobalt, a rare and toxic metal essential to smartphones, electric vehicles, AI, and other technologies, reveals this contradiction at the center of our global economy. Our demand for these goods relies on the same brutal dynamics that have played out for centuries in this land: environmental harm, contamination of land and water, child labor, gender and sexual-based violence, and the exploitation of class under-resourced people of color in Congo. Wealthier people get the goods while the output biases in our systems of production allow us distance and plausible deniability in the face of untold suffering. When we look at our own commodity chains, the often hidden trails of our batteries and other electronic products in time and space before they got into our hands, we can trace many of our products to Congo. We are materially connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Congo has an estimated $24 trillion in untapped natural reserves. It is one of the most inherently valuable places on Earth. Yet, due to these longstanding and asymmetrical power relations, it is simultaneously extremely vulnerable. In 2020, 85.3% of the population in Congo lived on less than $3 a day. By 2026, projections estimate that fully 94.9% of the population will be at or below this international poverty threshold.
But, it doesn't have to be this way. We can do more than express fear and enforce travel bans and restrictions.
We can understand the Ebola outbreak as a medical crisis shaped by structural violence in which we are all complicit.
If we can recognize how we are connected to these systems, then we can take responsibility and action to change them. We can reinvest in funding the United Nations and support long-term healthcare infrastructure. We can become more socially and environmentally sustainable by holding corporations and governments accountable for exploitative labor and harmful environmental practices. We can demand more ethical and transparent supply chains. We can recognize that racism and environmental racism enable this disproportionate harm and take steps to do better. We can vote for people who have a world systems view, who understand that global trade, politics, and public health are connected. Leaders of this era need to understand that what we do, and how we do it, matter in life-and-death ways for people beyond our local contexts.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence. This cycle can end, if only we can align our shared values of more sustainable and equitable practices with our political will.
A virus with a potential mortality rate of 90% should concern us all. We should all fear and work to stop this outbreak. We should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation. And, we need to engage in the transformative justice required to facilitate sustainable social and environmental ways rather than those of depravity.
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Kenyan Court Rejects Plan for US Ebola Quarantine Center Amid Growing Outbreak
Kenya's largest medical professionals union, which welcomed the ruling, argued that if setting up an Ebola quarantine facility "is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya."
May 29, 2026
A day after US officials said Kenya had approved a request to open a quarantine center for Americans exposed to a rare strain of the Ebola virus, a court in the East African nation on Friday temporarily blocked the plan amid a growing outbreak in neighboring Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The High Court prohibited the Kenyan government from establishing or operating any Ebola exposure, quarantine, isolation, or treatment facility in the country under any agreement with the United States or any other foreign government or agency.
The court also blocked Kenya's government from allowing anyone infected with or exposed to Ebola into the country pending the outcome of the case, which was filed by the Katiba Institute, a civil rights group.
“At its core, the case is about preserving constitutional accountability, protecting public health, and ensuring that no government may place expediency above the lives and safety of the people of Kenya,” Katiba Institute executive director Nora Mbagathi said Thursday.
A 50-bed Ebola quarantine center was set to open Friday at Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki, located approximately 125 miles north of Nairobi. The facility would have been operated by members of the US Public Health Service, a uniformed branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday during a Cabinet meeting that “we cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States."
However, US public health officials strongly criticized the plan to quarantine Americans in Kenya instead of repatriating them, with one emergency physician accusing the Trump administration of “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own."
Elected leaders in Laikipia County welcomed the High Court's ruling. They had opposed the US quarantine center, and had asked in a joint statement prior to the decision, "Why Laikipia?"
"What does the US government know about this that they are not accepting their own affected citizens into their soil but are ready to have them elsewhere?" the officials added.
The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists, and Dentists Union (KMPDU), which had strongly opposed the quarantine center and had threatened to strike, also welcomed the High Court ruling.
"We are utterly disgusted by the government’s apparent willingness to trade national biosecurity and the lives of its citizens for foreign aid," KMPDU secretary general Davji Bhimji Attelah said in a statement Thursday, referring to the $13.5 million the Trump administration pledged for Ebola preparedness in Kenya, part of a broader $125 million US commitment toward fighting the disease.
Kenyan healthcare workers are pushing back hard against reported plans for the U.S. to establish Ebola quarantine/treatment facilities in Kenya for exposed American personnel during the ongoing Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Central/East Africa.
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— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) May 28, 2026 at 11:31 AM
"We will not sit back and watch Kenya be treated as a containment colony for a lethal pathogen that we did not generate," Attelah added. “We will not tolerate an apartheid healthcare model on Kenyan soil. If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya."
Critics say President Donald Trump’s ideologically driven decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), his administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, and reduced funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global public health efforts have adversely affected the response to the current Ebola epidemic, compared with 2014 and 2019 outbreaks.
The WHO said Friday that there were a total of 906 suspected Ebola cases and 223 suspected deaths reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as of Wednesday, and 125 confirmed cases in the DRC and 9 in Uganda, with 18 deaths among the confirmed cases in both countries.
Ebola—which typically kills between 25% and 90% of infected people, depending upon the strain of the virus and quality of available medical care—causes widespread and often catastrophic damage to the body’s blood vessels, immune system, and organs. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals, including fruit bats, porcupines, and non-human primates, and then spreads between humans through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of infected people.
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'A Dramatic Abdication': Trump Admin to Send US Citizens With Ebola Exposure to Kenya
The administration is currently setting up a facility in Kenya where US citizens will be not only monitored, but also treated, for Ebola in a major departure from previous responses.
May 27, 2026
In what one emergency physician and public health expert called “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own,” the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Americans with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola to a facility in Kenya, instead of repatriating them and treating them in the state-of-the-art quarantine and treatment facilities the US has for dangerous diseases that pose a threat to public health.
The facility is currently being set up, The New York Times reported, and several dozen Public Health Service officers—whose agency operates under the Department of Defense—are training to deploy to Kenya. The PHS also deployed to Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
"This is unbelievable and infuriating," said Dr. Craig Spencer, a professor of public health at Brown University.
According to the Times, the PHS officers in Kenya were initially going to monitor any Americans, such as healthcare workers who have gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to help contain the outbreak that was declared a public health emergency of international concern earlier this month. Those who showed symptoms would be transferred to European hospitals; at least seven Americans have been sent to facilities in Germany and the Czech Republic in recent weeks.
But two people familiar with the plans told the Times that the administration now plans to see to the patients' treatment in the Kanya facility as well.
"When Americans will need us most—especially those who go abroad to help end this outbreak at its source—the US government plans to send them to a hospital it is standing up from scratch in Kenya," wrote Spencer on Substack on Tuesday. "I find it incredibly difficult to believe that we can stand up a facility in the next few weeks—or even months—with the staff, the supplies, and the experience we’ve built over the past decade in more than a dozen hospitals across the US."
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, who helped treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone in 2014, said the plan does not make sense "from a preparedness, operational, or ethical standpoint."
"How are public health officers going to take care of persons who get sick?" said Kuppalli. "These are not persons who have experience in providing high levels of care for persons with this infection. Also, why would a PHS officer deploy knowing if they had an exposure that they wouldn’t be repatriated?"
Spencer raised concerns that the plan "could push people to hide potential exposures, or incentivize individuals or organizations to downplay those exposures. If you know that any 'high-risk' exposure will get you shipped to Kenya instead of sent home, it’s not hard to imagine people not being fully forthcoming about what may have happened to them. That is exactly backwards from how you contain a disease."
"This will also discourage Americans from joining as part of the response," he wrote. "I know of multiple healthcare providers who are considering deploying with humanitarian organizations, and we need a cavalry to help support the on-the-ground response if we have any hope of ending this outbreak. But programs and policies like this are exactly the reasons people will hesitate to sign up."
Spencer, who contracted Ebola after deploying to West Africa in 2014 and was quarantined and treated at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, emphasized that the strain of Ebola that began spreading in Ituri Province, DRC and is confirmed to have spread to Uganda does not have an approved treatment or vaccine.
"Survival depends heavily on the quality of the system and the people around you," wrote Spencer. "We have that system—I survived Ebola and am here today partly because of it—but we are choosing not to use it."
The news of the plan to send infected Americans to Kenya comes as suspected cases have ballooned to at least 906, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) latest Weekly External Situation Report, released on Sunday. The report said there have been 223 suspected deaths from the current Ebola strain, which is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, as opposed to the Zaire strain, for which a vaccine and treatments have been approved. More than 100 cases and 10 deaths have been confirmed in DRC, while seven cases and one death have been confirmed in Uganda.
The report emphasized that following up with contacts of people who have developed Ebola symptoms is a "major challenge," with just 19.3% of contacts seen by health professionals within the previous 24 hours as of May 23.
"Constraints include insecurity, movement restrictions, highly mobile populations linked to mining communities, and
difficulties tracing contacts across dispersed and cross-border populations, as well as limited trained contact tracers to
date," reads the report.
Low levels of trust in the affected communities—a major impediment to an effective response—also appear to be raising the risk of transmission. As Reuters reported on Monday, at least three attacks on Ebola treatment facilities in the northeastern DRC have caused dozens of patients to flee the hospitals.
"The attackers are reportedly motivated by a desire for the hospitals to release the bodies of deceased Ebola patients for burial—unsafe given that the virus remains transmissible after death—or by suspicion or doubt about the virus," reported Reuters.
Dr. Richard Lokudu, medical director of the Mongbwalu General Referral Hospital in Ituri, told Reuters that "there is denial of the disease within the population."
While US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed WHO for being "a little late" to identify that outbreak, public health experts have pointed to the Trump administration's massive cuts to foreign assistance and global public health initiatives, including the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as a major factor that likely allowed cases to spread for an extended period of time before international officials realized the outbreak was occurring.
As Common Dreams reported last week, USAID's Ebola prevention work was largely halted by the Department of Government Efficiency, run last year by tech billionaire Elon Musk—despite Musk's insistence that funding for Ebola efforts was maintained. USAID had more than 50 staffers dedicated to responding to and preparing for disease outbreaks like Ebola and Marburg virus, but DOGE's cuts reduced the workforce to about six people.
With Rubio insisting that "we can’t have Ebola cases" in the US and that keeping the disease out of US borders is the top priority for the country, the administration has invoked Title 42 to keep travelers from the DRC, Uganda, and neighboring South Sudan from entering the US if they were in any of the three countries in the previous 21 days. WHO has warned that travel bans and restrictions are not based in science.
Cuts at the CDC have also led the agency to put out a call to its workforce, seeking volunteers to conduct public health screenings at airports.
The State Department said last week it had mobilized about $23 million to help the DRC and Uganda respond to the outbreak and is "mobilizing CDC staff and resources."
But Spencer said Sunday that the administration's travel bans and focus on keeping those affected by Ebola out of US borders are "a policy you put in place when you have nothing else meaningful to add. It gives the appearance of doing ‘something’ while effectively doing nothing of value at all. And it takes away attention from where the real problem is."
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