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ebola
'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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An Ebola Outbreak Made More Deadly and Dangerous Thanks to Trump
We lived through another pandemic nightmare with this president, but the warnings about what he was unleashing with his 2025 assault on USAID and CDC were not heeded. Once again, people are paying with their lives.
May 27, 2026
The current, rapidly metastasizing Ebola outbreak in East and Central Africa is a sobering reminder of how unprepared we remain for the inevitability of the next pandemic that is always sure to come. Especially when the US continues to hamstring the global efforts needed to contain deadly eruptions.
As of Sunday, May 24, there were 231 deaths and more than 1,000 cases reported, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though 10 African countries are now considered at risk. “You cannot cut the systems that detect and stop outbreaks early— then act shocked when they spiral. Pathogens exploit weak systems,” said Krutika Kuppalli, MD FIDSA, in a post on Sunday.
On Monday, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the world that the outbreak was “outpacing us."
The Trump administration, previously the WHO's largest funder, is the biggest reason of these failures and need to play catch up. Assistance from the US to the DRC reportedly fell from $1.4 billion in 2024 to just $21 million in 2026, said Kuppalli.
“Many of the international systems created or strengthened after earlier Ebola crises have been weakened,” the Washington Post reported last week. While the US once "played a central coordinating role in previous Ebola response efforts,” the newspaper noted, "that infrastructure has been significantly diminished following Trump administration cuts" in early 2025.
With the US pulling out of the WHO and eviscerating the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which routed money and supplies quickly, the ability to help organizations on the ground pivot from prevention "to contact tracing and communications" has vanished, said Stephanie Psaki, US coordinator for global health security in the Biden administration.
The Trump administration has even barred key infectious disease officials from communicating with the WHO. “The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the former lead of USAID’s Ebola response team.
On May 20, National Nurses United, issued a statement admonishing the Trump administration for making everyone less safe in the face of the outbreak.
“Nurses understand the life-or-death importance of prevention, and when it comes to infectious diseases, that means having strong infrastructure in place to rapidly detect and respond to new outbreaks before they are out of control," said NNU. "The Trump administration has purposely taken a sledgehammer to that infrastructure over the past year.”
Nurses are prominent among the health workers, and health policy researchers, who have long warned of the danger of sudden outbreaks that can lead to massive, deadly pandemics.
“The arrival of the next great pandemic has always been a ‘when,’ not an ‘if,’ and firewalls for stopping it are getting thinner,” journalists Conn Hallinan and Carl Bloice wrote in 2005 in the California Nurses Association’s Revolution magazine. That piece was written amid concern for the spreading of avian flu, but the warning signs of a failing prevention and response system were already evident. “Public health budgets in this nation and across the globe are being systematically starved of funding,” they wrote.
Four years later, H1NI, also known as swine flu, brought the fears to life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated there were 60.8 million cases and an estimated range of between 151,700 to 575,400 deaths worldwide its first year alone. Deborah Burger, RN, then president of the California Nurses Association, warned, “We should learn the lessons of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, one of which was the enormous mitigating effect on mortality of adequate nursing care.”
Those working on the frontlines to care for infected patients are particularly vulnerable. Speaking to Hallinan and Bloice, University of Minnesota researcher Michael Osterholm predicted back in 2005 that “health care workers would become ill and die at rates similar to, or even higher than in the general public" in the face of a pandemic.
On July 17, 2009, Karen Ann Hays, a cancer care RN at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, CA near Sacramento, and a healthy triathlete and marathon runner, became the first health care worker in California to die of H1N1. Only after the union announced plans for a one-day strike affecting 16,000 RNs in California and Nevada, did then-Gov. Schwarzenegger and major hospitals implement new safety protocols.
In March 2014, the largest outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus was reported in West Africa. By August, the WHO declared a public health emergency as it spread in Africa, and reached Europe and the US. As noted, the outbreak was particularly dangerous for healthcare workers exposed to Ebola patients.
Recalling the spread of H1N1, NNU urged federal, state, and local officials to adhere to strict infectious disease guidelines to protect patients, healthcare workers, and the public. Seeing little done by September 2014, more than 1,000 nurses held a march and die-in during a convention in Las Vegas to alert the public to inadequate US preparations to stop the spread of Ebola and similar pandemics.
Days later, a patient recently returned to the US from Liberia, was diagnosed with Ebola in a Dallas hospital and died. Within two weeks, two Dallas nurses in that hospital, Nina Pham and Amber Vincent, were infected. NNU called on President Barack Obama to “invoke his executive authority” to order all US hospitals to meet the highest “uniform, national standards and protocols” to “safely protect patients, all healthcare workers and the public.”
Burger testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the lack of mandated protections for nurses and patients. “The risk of exposure to the population at large merely starts with front-line caregivers like registered nurses, physicians and other healthcare workers—it does not end there," Burger told lawmakers. "If we cannot protect our nurses and other healthcare workers, we cannot protect anyone.”
A two-day strike the next month at 86 hospitals and clinics over the lack of Ebola preparedness again helped spur needed measures. Within weeks, the federal government, and some states, including California, enacted reforms to improve pandemic protections in US facilities, and as NNU was also urging, escalated support for global protections in West Africa.
Cuba was in the forefront of providing direct frontline care in West Africa in 2014, sending 165 Cuban nurses and doctors, risking their own lives. At a time today with the US threatening an invasion of Cuba following months of an illegal blockade that has had a debilitating impact on its health care system, it’s worth recalling that as recently as 2024, Cuba had dispatched more than 20,000 medical staff to more than 50 countries in humanitarian missions.
When Trump first came into office, he ignored the preparedness lessons. Beginning the morning after his 2017 inauguration, Trump systematically dismantled a pandemic infrastructure response program put in place by Obama. By January 2020, when the WHO had begun warning of the outbreak known as Covid-19, the Trump administration was caught flatfooted. As the initial US infections appeared, Trump’s first public statement that month was this: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
In contrast, NNU had already begun to press Trump to implement national and safety protocols and measures, with public accountability. Instead, Trump’s response was months of denials, deflections, and promotion of false cures while dismissing the best protective measures. By June 2020, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump insisted, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”
By February 2024, the US counted nearly 7 million cases, and over 1.1 million deaths. So many lives could have been saved with advance preparedness and rapid implementation of the proper safety measures.
Hospital employers and numerous state governments, especially in GOP-controlled states, took their lead from the Trump administration to slow walk or ignore critical protections. Workers in essential front-line occupations, from public transportation to nursing homes and hospitals, as well as lower income jobs in grocery and drug stores, poultry and other meat processing, and service industries generally, paid a high price, especially workers of color.
Through August 2023, the Covid death count hit 5,753 for health care workers overall, including 501 RNs. Filipinos, 4 percent of all RNs, accounted for 21 percent of the deaths among nurses.
In the 2014 outbreak, 881 doctors, nurses, and midwives were infected in West Africa, and 513 died. The crisis created a severe shortage of healthcare workers across the region.
By May 21 in the current Ebola outbreak, at least four health worker deaths have been reported in the DRC. Three Red Cross volunteers have also died. One doctor evacuated from the DRC, waiting in a specialized hospital room in Prague to see whether he has Ebola, said his former colleagues in the DRC are beginning to die of the deadly disease.
The International Rescue Committee warned on Tuesady that thus outbreak is spreading faster than responders can contain it and risks becoming "the deadliest on record."
As the NNU warned last week, neither the nation nor the world can afford another public health mismanagement disaster from the like of Trump. “Nurses have already lived through one bungled, global health emergency response during the first Trump administration," said the union, "and we are appalled to know that when it comes to Ebola, hantavirus, or any other infectious disease, the United States under Donald Trump is now even less prepared than in 2020."Keep ReadingShow Less
With Epidemic 'Outpacing' Response, WHO Chief Warns Ebola Outbreak Will 'Get Worse Before It Gets Better'
"The delay in detecting the outbreak means that we are now playing catch-up with a very fast-moving epidemic."
May 25, 2026
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Monday that the swiftly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda "will get worse before it gets better," as a deadly delay in detecting infections has responders to the epidemic "playing catch-up."
"The outbreak is spreading rapidly," Tedros said during a virtual ministerial meeting on the matter. "So far, 101 cases have been confirmed in DRC, with 10 confirmed deaths. But we know the epidemic in DRC is much larger. There are now more than 900 suspected cases and 220 suspected deaths."
"Countries bordering DRC are at especially high risk and should take immediate action," he asserted. "In Uganda, there are five confirmed cases and one death."
Tedros pointed out that "there are several aspects of this outbreak that make it especially challenging."
"First, the delay in detecting the outbreak means that we are now playing catch-up with a very fast-moving epidemic," he said. "We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment, the epidemic is outpacing us."
"Second, as you know, the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu are highly insecure, with intensified fighting in recent months, causing more than 100,000 people to be newly displaced," the WHO chief continued. "There is also significant distrust of outside authorities among the local population. In the past week, there have been two security incidents at health facilities."
"WHO is fully committed to working under the leadership of the governments of DRC and Uganda, side by side with Africa [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and all other partners," Tedros added. "We will not rest until we bring this outbreak under control."
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.
Critics say US President Donald Trump's ideologically driven decision to withdraw the US from the WHO, his administration's dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), 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.
After US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that the WHO was "a little late" in identifying new Ebola infections, Tedros retorted that "we don’t replace the country’s work, we only support them," and suggested that Rubio's comments could be rooted in "a lack of understanding" of the agency and countries' responsibilities.
While Rubio said that “our number-one objective on Ebola, before anything else... has to be, we can’t have it affect the United States,” public health experts warn that Trump administration actions could make it more likely that the virus will make its way to the country.
There is currently no confirmed CDC director, Food and Drug Administration commissioner, or surgeon general.
Taking aim at Trump's evisceration of key public health agencies and programs, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said last week: “Ebola does not wait for bureaucratic reorganizations. It spreads when surveillance systems are weakened, health workers are laid off, clinics lack protective equipment, and communities lose the trusted partners who help detect and contain outbreaks before they become public health emergencies."
"This is the perfect storm President Trump created," she continued. "He recklessly dismantled USAID, withheld and slashed other United States assistance to the region, fired critical staff, and created global health chaos. This is not efficiency. It is dangerous neglect."
"The United States spent years building the relationships, supply chains, laboratories, and community health networks that help stop deadly diseases at their source," DeLauro added. "The Trump administration tore into that capacity and now wants to pretend the consequences were unforeseeable.”
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