• Posted May 27, 2026

U.S. To Keep Ebola-Exposed Citizens In Kenya Under New Policy

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Ebola-exposed U.S. citizens to Kenya rather than bring them back to the United States for observation and treatment.

A plan is in motion to set up a facility in Kenya where individuals can quarantine or receive treatment through the departments of State, Defense and Health and Human Services, sources told The New York Times. A few dozen Public Health Service officers are preparing to deploy to the East African nation to provide care to Americans at high risk of developing Ebola.  

As of May 26, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo had surpassed 1,000 cases, according to its health ministry. More than 200 have died.

Initially, the plan was to monitor the Americans in Kenya and send any who started to show symptoms to Europe for treatment. Now, the administration plans to provide treatment in Kenya as well, The Times reported. Government scientists and physicians who develop symptoms will be treated there, too.

Advanced care needs are expected to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

The approach differs from previous administrations’ responses to outbreaks, in which U.S. citizens and health care workers exposed to the virus were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units, The Times said. This month, the administration flew an American aid doctor who developed symptoms to a hospital in Germany and sent six other Americans to Germany and the Czech Republic for monitoring.

Last week, the Trump administration invoked a public health law, barring immigrants and legal permanent residents who had been in Congo, Uganda or South Sudan in the past 21 days from entering the United States. This new plan would also keep potentially exposed U.S. citizens out of the country, sources speaking anonymously told The Times.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, was particularly surprised by the plan to keep Public Health Service Officers out of the United States. 

“We have a strong ethical commitment to care for them with the best possible care in the U.S.,” he said.

Multiple facilities in the U.S. have state-of-the-art resources for monitoring and treating dangerous diseases like Ebola, including one in Omaha, Nebraska, where 18 Americans are now under observation for hantavirus. 

While the facility in Kenya may be better than those in Congo, a Brown University expert told The Times, it may not be of the same caliber as those established in the United States for such illnesses and dangerous pathogens.

“I find it hard to believe that they’re going to be able to stand up in the span of a couple days or even months a similar system that has been created over the past decade to do exactly this,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, a public health expert at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Spencer is an emergency medicine physician who contracted Ebola in 2014 while treating patients in Guinea. He was in an intensive care unit in New York City for 19 days.

Spencer told The Times that leaving Americans in Africa is “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own.”

Early access to high-quality care and treatment can greatly improve the odds of survival from Ebola disease, which has a death rate as high as 80% to 90%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We know that their chances of getting through an Ebola infection would be higher in specialized units that have been designed to care for them,” Inglesby told The Times. 

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Information has information on the current Ebola situation.

SOURCE: The New York Times, May 26, 2026