Donald Trump and the World Health Organization are teed up for another clash over infectious disease travel bans.
Trump ignored the WHO’s advice, and its criticism of travel restrictions, when he closed the U.S. border to foreigners who had recently been in China at the outset of the Covid pandemic, and he’s ignoring the U.N. agency again now, at the outset of what is already one of the worst Ebola outbreaks ever, by barring most travelers from the affected countries.
Andrew Nixon, a health department spokesperson, described travel bans in a statement to POLITICO as a “longstanding public health tool” that will help the federal government reduce the risk of international spread while working to contain the outbreak at the source.
The WHO sees it quite differently. “Such measures are usually implemented out of fear and have no basis in science,” it said on May 17 in the same document that declared the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a “public health emergency of international concern.”
Though most countries are following the WHO’s advice, the U.S. is far from alone in ignoring it. More than a dozen other countries have also imposed travel restrictions, according to Jean Kaseya, the director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the public health agency of the African Union. The split underscores the difference between national leaders’ goals and those of the United Nations body whose aim is to prevent epidemics from becoming pandemics.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that travel bans always will happen,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Politicians don’t really care if it works or not, because it makes them look like they’re taking decisive action.”
Whether they work or not is a matter of debate, of course. Australia managed to nearly eliminate Covid cases with rigid travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021, but few other countries were able to match that success.
An analysis of data from 165 countries, published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal in 2022, found that early implementation of international travel controls delayed — but did not prevent — the spread of Covid-19.
Covid, which can spread among asymptomatic people and through the air, is far more contagious than Ebola, which spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of symptomatic people.
The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, often speaks of the need for solidarity among nations in combating diseases that don’t respect national borders.
“No country should close its borders or place any restrictions on travel and trade — such restrictions can compromise local economies and negatively affect response operations from a security and logistics perspective,” the WHO told POLITICO in an emailed statement.
The global health body has assessed the risk of the Ebola outbreak spreading as very high in the Congo, high in neighboring regions and low at a global level.
Other international health organizations such as the Africa CDC and experts who study the spread of disease broadly agree that travel restrictions are counterproductive, on the grounds that they breed stigma and encourage individuals not to disclose disease exposures, making outbreaks harder to track.
“The treatment that Western countries are applying to Africa… it’s not acceptable,” said Kaseya on a Thursday call with reporters.
At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump said the WHO put “political correctness over life-saving measures by opposing travel restrictions.” Tedros had earlier called out the 22 nations that had adopted closures saying it risked “increasing fear and stigma with little public health benefit.”
The beef was at the root of Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the WHO, and Trump still disagrees. This time around, his administration has implemented some of the United States’ most stringent travel restrictions for infectious disease ever. It’s even diverting all Americans exposed to Ebola to other countries for quarantine and care.
“We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday.
Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, Jordan, Bahrain, Rwanda and Uganda are also imposing travel restrictions. Canada has imposed 21-day quarantines for travelers from Congo, as well as neighboring Uganda, which has seen several cases, and South Sudan, which abuts the province where the outbreak is centered but has not reported any cases. Congo has reported around 1,000 suspected cases and 230 suspected deaths from the lethal hemorrhagic fever. Officials believe the actual numbers are higher.
David Bell, a former WHO medical officer and scientist who now writes for the conservative Brownstone Institute, said politicians are doing what’s most expedient for them.
“If one person gets it, a lot of the media will blame an individual politician who could have stopped it,” Bell said. “Politicians know that, so they overreact to protect themselves.”
A political tool
While the U.S. is no longer a WHO member, it is still a signatory of the International Health Regulations, a set of international rules that govern what governments can do during an outbreak. According to the rules, governments should adopt the least restrictive international travel measures possible to reduce the risk of an outbreak spreading to their country. But countries often ignore these rules during outbreaks.
By the time the WHO declared this Ebola outbreak a public health emergency, the virus may have already been spreading for months undetected, in part because patients were not being tested for the rare Bundibugyo strain of the disease.
Since then, the U.S. has announced it will temporarily bar green card holders and non-U.S. citizens from entering the country if they have recently been in a country where the virus is spreading. Rather than repatriating Americans working to combat the outbreak in Congo who are exposed or infected, the U.S. has sent them to Europe for care, even though the U.S. maintains a network of pathogen treatment centers created to handle diseases like Ebola.
Top Trump administration officials speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity Thursday defended that approach, saying health reasons, not politics, justified it. Putting patients with Ebola on a shorter flight to Europe would be better for their treatment, one of the officials said.
A plan by the Trump administration to send Americans exposed to Ebola to a quarantine facility being set up in Kenya sparked pushback from doctors and career diplomats, who argue that the U.S. government must protect Americans’ right to return home.
The facility was due to become operational Friday, but a Kenyan court has temporarily halted the plan.
“We are aware of the court action filed in Kenya against the Ebola isolation facility. We are in touch with Kenyan authorities and are optimistic we can resolve objections,” the State Department wrote on the social media platform X on Friday evening.
During an outbreak in West Africa that started in 2013 and grew to be the largest on record — resulting in more than 11,000 deaths by 2016 — the U.S. took a starkly different approach.
The Obama administration did not implement travel bans, only diverting travelers who were recently in affected countries to certain airports for screening. That decision drew the ire of some Republican lawmakers at the time, spurring calls for a travel ban. The administration’s decision not to implement a ban — and to send U.S. military personnel to aid the response — also drew criticism from one Donald Trump, who took to the social media platform then known as Twitter to express his dismay.
“How dumb is our president to send thousands of poorly trained and ill-equipped soldiers over to West Africa to fight Ebola,” wrote Trump at the time. “Stop all flights.”
It’s unclear how that history may have colored Trump’s response to the 2026 outbreak, or how hands-on he’s been in the U.S. response. He has made few public statements about the U.S. response.
An official at the CDC, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that travel restrictions can be useful in limited circumstances, such as while implementing better screening procedures, but “are not a viable long-term solution for keeping infection away.”
The U.S. directs flights carrying Americans who have been in Congo, Uganda and South Sudan within 21 days of returning home to four international airports, in Virginia, Georgia, Texas and New York, where they’re screened for any potential Ebola symptoms.
Bell said he believes travel restrictions are largely a political tool, not a public health one.
The bans usually come about, he said, because politicians are afraid of being blamed for even one case of Ebola occurring in their country — even if their country is well equipped to handle it.
Bell pointed to myriad factors that have caused Ebola’s rapid spread in Congo’s Ituri Province, the epicenter of the current outbreak. Frequent political violence plagues the region, which has resulted in widespread displacement of residents, and some of the province is under the control of armed groups, which regularly target health centers.
Additionally, many individuals in Ituri live in extreme poverty, and cannot afford to seek medical care.
Those factors, Bell pointed out, are not applicable to the U.S., which doesn’t have comparable poverty and security problems. “It’s not going to break out in America,” he said.
