An ad hoc group of Ebola-experienced public health and legal experts has signed on to an open letter addressing their concerns about the USG plans to quarantine US citizens in a to-be-constructed field unit in Kenya. Below is the full text of the letter, unedited. I’ll add some analysis on it later, but I’m sharing it now because I think it makes some very clear points on the legal, ethical, epidemiological, and political concerns about the plan.
You might remember signatory Kaci Hickox’s name. She’s a nurse and former EIS Officer who sued former NJ governor Chris Christie when she was forcibly quarantined after returning home from West Africa, where she had been working in a Doctors Without Borders Ebola care unit. (She won.)
The letter was released yesterday, and the New York Times is reporting this morning that Kenyan courts have put a temporary halt to the plans for the unit. I’ve heard conflicting reports from sources about what’s happening on the ground in Kenya: 35 Public Health Service Officers* are currently on the ground there and 20 more will begin training to join the mission on Sunday. I’ll report back if and when I learn more.
*For more on what the PHS is, scroll to the bottom — I’ve reposted a little explainer there.
Here’s the open letter:
May 28, 2026
To the President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,
We write to you today to express our profound concern regarding the reported plan to transport US citizens with possible or confirmed Ebola exposure to Kenya for observation and treatment, rather than providing care within the United States. As a coalition of epidemiologists, bioethicists, global and public health law scholars, civil liberties lawyers, medical professionals, and public health practitioners we feel it is our duty to warn you of the dangers of this approach. We recognize the urgency of containing the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. With more than 1,000 suspected cases and more than 200 deaths recorded in just eleven days, the region faces a catastrophic health emergency; and these figures are likely to be a considerable underestimate. Yet the strategy of quarantining at-risk US citizens at a new facility in a foreign nation represents a fundamental breach of the government's duty of care and the constitutional right of US citizens to return home. It also poses a threat to US health security.
President Trump, during his first term, successfully contained the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His leadership delivered robust international support paired with rigorous domestic monitoring and transparent communication, demonstrating that preventing transmission on US soil can—and must— be achieved through evidence-based public health actions and supporting the international response. The US already has a dedicated system, built and sustained at taxpayer expense, to manage public health threats.
In direct contrast, the current proposal to deny entry to US citizens who might have been exposed to Ebola dangerously conflates travel restrictions with medical necessity and global response strategy. From a medical standpoint, this approach introduces unacceptable risks. Quarantining US citizens outside US jurisdiction complicates contact tracing, legal oversight, and the provision of consistent, high-quality medical care. Ebola is a complex and lethal disease. US citizens deserve access to specialized care in purposebuilt state-of-the-art facilities in the United States.
US taxpayers have invested more than a billion dollars to build a network of biocontainment units in major hospitals across the country. These are essentially intensive care units that are engineered to provide maximum biocontainment coupled with the highest standard of care. They take years to design and build. They also require extensively trained staff to safely execute complex clinical interventions without exposing themselves. The track record speaks for itself. There has never been onward transmission to health care workers in these units. Every Ebola patient treated in an US unit survived their disease due to the heroic efforts of the highly trained clinical care teams treating them. In the proposed Kenyan facility, US citizens will be in a makeshift facility that almost certainly will not provide a level of biocontainment or security close to that of a US unit. It will be staffed by personnel with only minimal training, which is insufficient for ensuring robust infection control, adequate biosafety and biosecurity, and high-quality care.
Legally, US citizens have an unqualified constitutional right to enter the United States. Ethically, our government cannot abdicate its responsibility to protect its own citizens by designating foreign soil as a quarantine zone. Doing so is not necessary for a disease like Ebola, for which we have well-established, demonstrably effective methods for mitigating transmission risk. It also sets a dangerous precedent that the human rights of US citizens are contingent upon geography and political expediency. Moreover, this strategy places the U.S. Public Health Service personnel deployed to staff the facility in Kenya at undue risk. For the first responders who answer the call to serve their country, we have an obligation to do everything in our power to keep them safe and ensure they have access to the best medical care available. We must implement plans that maximize success and impact while actively mitigating risks to those willing to put their lives on the line—a goal best achieved by monitoring US citizens returning from Ebola-affected countries within the United States.
We urge the Administration to immediately halt the implementation of this plan. Instead, we call for the activation of a comprehensive public health response in the affected region and domestically. This response must include treating every exposed citizen with the same standard of care, regardless of their location. All US citizens must be repatriated in accordance with their Constitutional rights and given access to the world-class facilities their tax dollars funded. Public trust is the bedrock of effective infectious disease response; forcing citizens into risky, potentially unlawful situations abroad rather than bringing them home to heal risks undermining trust and exacerbating the very crisis we seek to contain.
We stand ready to assist in formulating a strategy that prioritizes national security, upholds the law, and respects human dignity.
Sincerely,
[Contact: Norman Siegel 347-907-0867, Steve Hyman 212-448-6228, Kaci Hickox 410-6350053]
Kaci Hickox, Nurse Epidemiologist and Infection Preventionist
Norman Siegel, Civil Liberties Lawyer
Steve Hyman, Civil Liberties Lawyer
Lawrence O. Gostin, Distinguished Professor of Global Health Law and Director, WHO Center on Global Health Law
Angela Rasmussen, Principal Scientist, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, University of Saskwatchewan and Science Chair, Save America Movement
Gregg Gonsalves, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist, Associate Professor, Yale School of Public Health
Fiona Havers MD, MHS, FIDSA, Infectious Diseases Physician and former CDC Medical Officer
Wait, what’s the PHS?
The PHS flies under the radar for most Americans. Its roughly 5,000 uniformed officers are non-combatants — health professionals whose day-to-day work is spread across federal agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, CDC, and Indian Health Service. They often deploy for humanitarian crises, including disease outbreaks or natural disasters, and occasionally, those deployments are overseas.
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, PHS officers ran a field hospital for infected health care workers. A few years later, officers led an effort to reunite migrant families separated by the Department of Homeland Security at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Sometimes, the deployments violate PHS officers’ moral centers: I recently wrote an NPR story about officers quitting over deployments to Immigration and Customs Enforcement migrant detention facilities. If you want to learn more about the PHS, you can check out this deep dive I did on the agency in 2019.
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