RFK Jr Overrides CDC to Keep Hantavirus Contact
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- RFK Jr. overrode CDC Deputy Director Michael Bell's analysis concluding that Angela Perryman could quarantine at home with daily remote monitoring, issuing a June 15 order continuing mandatory quarantine while citing no scientific rationale.
- The CDC asked states to provide in-person symptom checks and round-the-clock guards for exposed cruise passengers — a measure health law experts called "highly atypical" for Andes virus, which is rarely transmitted person-to-person.
- Health law professors Lawrence Gostin (Georgetown) and James Hodge (ASU) called the detention "authoritarian," "unconstitutional," and "unprecedented," with Gostin noting Kennedy is "reviewing his own order" as a political appointee with no evidence offered.
- Angela Perryman, the American passenger on the MV Hondius, has asked to self-quarantine in Florida instead; 10 other passengers returned home to self-quarantine, but Florida refused the CDC's guard and in-person monitoring conditions.
- Both Gostin and Hodge helped draft the CDC's 2017 quarantine rules, which permit the HHS secretary to overturn the agency's medical review — a power they say exists on paper but is unconstitutional to wield without scientific justification.
- Experts warned the order sets a "terrible precedent" as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues, with US cases possibly emerging this summer.
- Gostin flagged the contradiction: Kennedy and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya spent years criticizing Covid-era public health restrictions, yet "their first response is not public health, it's not science, it's coercion."
Why it matters: A political appointee is overriding career CDC medical judgment to detain an American citizen with no stated scientific justification, and the very health law experts who helped draft the CDC's 2017 quarantine rules warn this is unconstitutional. If the template holds, any HHS secretary can detain Americans for infectious-disease exposure without evidence — and experts warn the chilling effect on self-reporting could make future outbreaks, including potential Ebola cases from DRC, harder to contain.
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