...Trump administration to open a 50-bed foreign Ebola containment facility.
The High Court in Nairobi on Friday froze a Trump administration plan to open a 50-bed offshore Ebola camp at a Kenyan air base, on the very day it was to begin operating. The order halts the starkest expression yet of an imperialist response to the deepening Ebola epidemic in central Africa, built on border control rather than the mobilization of medical resources.
Judge Patricia Nyaundi barred the Kenyan government from “establishing, operationalizing, facilitating, approving or permitting” any Ebola quarantine, isolation, or treatment facility under any arrangement with the United States or a foreign government, and from admitting anyone exposed to or infected with the virus, pending a hearing set for June 2. The facility at Laikipia Air Base, about 125 miles north of Nairobi, was built by the US military and was to be staffed by US Public Health Service officers. Washington claimed it had secured Kenya’s written approval, even as President William Ruto’s government refused to defend the deal publicly.
The camp would institutionalize a policy of keeping exposed US citizens out of the country entirely, unprecedented in the history of American Ebola responses. Washington has already invoked the public health statute Title 42 to bar travelers and green-card holders arriving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda, and South Sudan, and it sent an infected American doctor to Germany for treatment rather than returning him to the US.
Public health experts have denounced the scheme as dangerous and irrational. Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, called it “reckless, unethical & possibly unlawful.” The administration’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opposed the plan, with its acting director Jay Bhattacharya reported to have advised against it.
The United States built a network of bio-containment units decades ago precisely to treat such patients. Its refusal to use them, former US Agency for International Development (USAID) official Jeremy Konyndyk noted, reflects a determination “to block anyone with Ebola from setting foot in the United States under any circumstances.”
The petitions brought by the Katiba Institute and the Law Society of Kenya halted the plan, but the working class can place no confidence in the courts or the government that struck the deal. The decisive pressure came from below. The doctors’ union issued a 48-hour strike threat when news broke of the plan to create the Ebola camp, denouncing the bid to make Kenya a “dumping ground,” but the bureaucracy acted only because it feared an independent movement of the rank and file.
