Trump exploits public health as Ebola epidemic spreads

As the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak spread across Central Africa, the U.S. government responded not by mobilizing medical resources, but by invoking Title 42, a public health law that it has already used as an instrument of immigration control and, now, as a foreign policy tool.

Marking a radical break with all the responses provided so far to the Ebola epidemic, Washington refuses to repatriate exposed American citizens so that they receive advanced biological containment care on their territory. Instead, it arranges to keep them out of the country, directing potentially infected Americans to a quarantine and processing center in Kenya and, if necessary, to high-level biocontainment units in Europe.

Title 42 is a provision of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 that authorizes the federal government to prohibit the entry of persons from foreign countries when an illness requiring quarantine abroad is considered a serious danger to public health. In March 2020, the Trump administration invoked Title 42 under the pretext of fighting COVID-19, according to a plan designed by White House advisor Stephen Miller, and used it to deport 400,000 immigrants. The Biden administration maintained and expanded this measure for years, deporting an additional 2.3 million people before its official expiration in May 2023.

Public health experts and human rights advocates have explicitly condemned this policy as it applies to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2022 study published in theAmerican Journal of Public Healthresearchers found that this policy lacked any real justification for infection control and was instead a political weapon used to justify xenophobic and anti-immigrant measures at the borders, in violation of international law.

The Trump administration has today reactivated this same instrument. An order dated May 18, 2026, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), invoked Title 42 to prohibit entry into the United States to non-citizens who have stayed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda or South Sudan within the previous 21 days. A few days later, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an interim final rule extending these same restrictions to legal permanent residents. Green card holders who had stayed in one of these three countries in the previous three weeks were barred from returning to the United States.

This maneuver reproduces the brutal logic of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of individualized risk assessments, scientific testing and appropriate quarantine protocols, the administration treats people from heavily affected African countries as vectors of the disease to be excluded en masse. The use of broad geographic criteria rather than targeted medical interventions reveals the political reality: the same tool once used to deny asylum to Latin American migrants is now being turned against African travelers and US residents under the pretext of Ebola.

After banning entry to foreigners, the administration applied the same logic to its own citizens. This turnaround was rapid and its consequences are overwhelming. Breaking with US policy on Ebola, the Trump administration announced its intention to send US citizens potentially exposed to the Bundibugyo virus to a quarantine and treatment center in Kenya, rather than repatriating them.

This policy did not appear suddenly. At the beginning of May, the administration had already transferred to Germany an American doctor showing symptoms and six other exposed Americans, transferred to Germany and the Czech Republic, for monitoring. These transfers were improvised; the Kenyan center marks the institutionalization of this policy.

According to the New York Timesthis center is set up jointly by the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services. Dozens of Public Health Service workers are already in training for deployment to Kenya. The initial plan called for monitoring exposed Americans on site and transferring anyone showing symptoms to Europe. This plan has since been expanded to include treatment in Kenya itself, including for government scientists and doctors.

One detail has been almost ignored in the media: the Ebola treatment center in Kenya still requires formal approval from the Kenyan government. The United States is preparing an Ebola treatment camp abroad, in a country that has not yet officially agreed to host it. This is not a detail. This illustrates how the imperialist powers are flouting the sovereignty of a nation supposed to be independent, which is already suffering the full brunt of the consequences of the regional crisis.

The world’s richest countries are continually outsourcing their risky industrial and medical activities to the Global South, while slashing funding to support local health systems and then using border controls to ensure that the resulting disaster stays on the other side. side of the dividing line.

The United States has several state-of-the-art biocontainment facilities, including the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which successfully treated Ebola patients during the 2014 outbreak in West Africa. The decision not to use them is not logistical, but political. It is based on the same nationalist calculation that led to the adoption of Title 42: the perceived political and biological risk linked to the care of Ebola patients on American soil is, for this administration, unacceptable. The border must remain closed, even to American citizens, thus setting a worrying precedent.

As of May 26, 2026, the DRC Ministry of Health recorded 121 confirmed cases, including 17 deaths, and 1,077 suspected cases, including 238 suspected deaths. Uganda has reported seven confirmed cases and one death. The total toll amounts to more than 1,200 infections, confirmed or suspected, spread across three provinces: Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu. This is the third largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded.

When the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on May 17, for the third time in a row, Ituri province had eight confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases and 80 presumed deaths. The rapidity with which these numbers have increased since then is in itself damning. The virus circulated undetected for weeks in April, while local health infrastructure remained deprived of essential resources and testing capabilities, a direct result of chronic underfunding made worse by the shutdown of USAID programs.

On May 23, the WHO raised its risk assessment for the DRC from high to very high. Two days later, WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus addressed international health leaders in a virtual ministerial meeting and made a blunt observation: “We are urgently scaling up our operations, but at the moment we are in behind the epidemic.” He spoke of the extreme insecurity that reigns in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu, where more than 100,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in recent months; the deep distrust of affected communities towards external health authorities; and the total absence of approved vaccines or specific treatments against the Bundibugyo strain.

This admission deserves in-depth analysis. The WHO noted this failure without specifying the causes. The Trump administration has cut international programs managed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by 83%. The east of the DRC is ravaged by militia offensives which have forced millions of people to crowd into overcrowded camps. An estimated 25.6 million people face critical or emergency food insecurity nationwide, leading to severe malnutrition that weakens the immune system and accelerates mortality from infectious diseases. These are not contextual factors. These are the determinants of the severity of the epidemic, and they are the direct consequence of imperialist policies.

Suspected cases, under investigation, have already appeared in Italy and India, following international air routes which make the concept of geographic containment illusory. The Bundibugyo strain has an incubation period of up to 21 days, meaning infected, asymptomatic travelers can transit through major international networks well before border controls can detect them. No emergency measure (Title 42) or foreign quarantine camp can change this biological reality.

In corporate media and official statements, international health authorities claim that the global response is being overwhelmed by the rapid spread of the virus. However, the epidemic does not go beyond a real global mobilization. It goes beyond an intervention that the dominant capitalist power has deliberately made insufficient. This is a deliberate choice: public health instruments have been transformed into instruments of nationalism, and the real debate – on resources, on war, on the structural conditions which make Central Africa a recurrent focus of epidemic disasters – is completely absent.

The working class and the impoverished masses of the DRC are bearing the brunt of the immediate and deadly consequences of this imperialist policy.