STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The second Trump administration - the current one - has imposed tough restrictions to prevent the spread of Ebola and hantavirus, and that is a departure from the first Trump administration's response to COVID. NPR's Rob Stein reports.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The Trump administration denounced lockdowns and other restrictive pandemic countermeasures and has been espousing leaving more medical decisions up to individual choice, health freedom to question vaccines and promote unproven remedies.
ASHISH JHA: They have spent so much time talking about not having the government impose on people's individual decisions and individual movement and argued that individual freedom trumps public health guidance.
STEIN: Dr. Ashish Jha is a senior fellow at Harvard, who served as President Biden's COVID-19 response coordinator.
JHA: And yet in response to the hantavirus and Ebola, this administration has chosen to impose very draconian and extreme public health measures.
STEIN: Passengers aboard the cruise ship hit by the hantavirus were told their confinement inside a Nebraska quarantine unit was voluntary. But the administration then took the rare step of imposing mandatory federal quarantine orders on two passengers who wanted to leave to quarantine at home.
JAMES HODGE: That's heavy-handed and really quite unnecessary.
STEIN: James Hodge is a public health law professor at Arizona State University. He says hantavirus doesn't spread very easily, so the passengers could safely quarantine at home.
HODGE: What we did experience post-COVID - rejecting authoritarian or strict or very heavy-handed public health interventions - have been somewhat abandoned by this administration, at least in response to hantavirus.
STEIN: Next, the federal government declared that none of the passengers in Omaha could leave unless a guard was posted outside their homes 24/7.
HODGE: They're taking a lot of steps that many would view as very authoritarian, very over the top.
STEIN: The Ebola crisis in Africa triggered two more controversial reactions - banning any travelers from the countries where Ebola's spreading from the U.S., and even more surprising, barring U.S. citizens helping fight Ebola from coming home to get treated if they become ill. Jennifer Nuzzo runs the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
JENNIFER NUZZO: It's completely stunning to me that we would not allow Americans to return to the United States. We have specialized taxpayer-built units that exist solely to provide lifesaving care to people who may be exposed to deadly diseases while they are doing important public health work.
STEIN: In some ways, the tactics mirror the administration's aggressive immigration crackdown, according to Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown.
LAWRENCE GOSTIN: We're seeing a real overkill that's trampling the civil liberties of American citizens.
STEIN: That could easily backfire, Gostin says, by discouraging other countries from reporting outbreaks, undermining public trust and driving exposed and infected people underground.
GOSTIN: The administration is trying to look tough, and that's just no way to deal with an infectious disease that really doesn't know borders. We need to use science in public health rather than, you know, political theatrics and overkill.
STEIN: In an email to NPR, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the administration was mounting an aggressive response, but said the restrictions were targeted and aimed at protecting the health and safety of the American people. Dr. Robert Redfield ran the CDC during the first Trump administration. He's now a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He thinks the Americans who catch Ebola in Africa should be evacuated to the U.S. for treatment. But Redfield says a general travel ban from the region and the restrictions on the hantavirus passengers are reasonable.
ROBERT REDFIELD: I do have a lot of confidence in the public health people that make these decisions, that they don't make it lightly when they take away someone's freedom of movement due to quarantine.
STEIN: But critics worry the administration could deploy aggressive tactics like these on a much larger scale if an outbreak of hantavirus, Ebola or some other pathogen actually erupts in the U.S.
Rob Stein, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
