RFK Jr. overrules experts to keep hantavirus cruise ship passenger in quarantine

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week refused to release a cruise ship passenger exposed to hantavirus in early May from a quarantine facility in Nebraska — despite a federal medical review that said there’s no need to confine her far from her Florida home.

The order from Kennedy, one of the nation’s most prominent critics of vaccine mandates, lockdowns and other government public health restrictions, spurred outrage from some advocates and legal scholars, who called it illegal and rooted in politics rather than public health.

The passenger, Angela Perryman, remained detained as of Tuesday.

“I want to be able to walk outside and put my feet in the grass,” Perryman said in an interview. “I want to be able to feel fresh air on my face when I want to. I want to be able to see people that are not in full PPE. I don’t want to be dehumanized anymore.”

Courtney Spencer, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said Florida chose not to comply with the federal government’s conditions for how tightly to monitor Perryman if she went back home. Continuing the quarantine order was “necessary to ensure both Ms. Perryman’s and her community’s well-being,” she said.

“The Andes virus has a 40 percent case fatality rate – 40 times that of COVID-19 – and a known incubation period of up to 42 days during which anyone exposed to this disease can become symptomatic and transmit it to others,” Spencer said.

Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert who helped shape current federal quarantine regulations, called the decision “an egregious violation” of a U.S. citizen’s rights.

“She’s being held, deprived of her liberty, which is the greatest deprivation you can have. She’s committed no crime. And there’s a broad medical consensus that she would be perfectly safe to finish her quarantine at home,” Gostin said.

Kennedy’s order strays from CDC official’s recommendation

Kennedy’s order Monday came after a medical review earlier this month overseen by Dr. Michael Bell of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within Kennedy’s HHS.

Bell reviewed testimony from CDC officials and an outside medical expert concerning Perryman’s challenge to an earlier order confining her to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Five weeks after leaving the ship, Perryman still has no symptoms. Bell noted that a reason Perryman wasn’t being allowed to return to Florida was because federal officials insisted that anyone returning to their home had to undergo daily in-person monitoring and to be under round-the-clock surveillance by local law or public officials.

Florida officials refused those conditions — which Gostin called “overkill” and a “waste of resources” — and proposed instead that Perryman simply do once-daily temperature checks and symptom assessments.

Experts at the meeting agreed that Florida’s proposal was reasonable and the federal requirements were unnecessary. Bell recommended Perryman be allowed to go home in a June 11 report obtained by The Associated Press.

But then, on Monday, Kennedy signed the order anyway, which said “continuation of the order is necessary to protect public health,” without explaining in what way he still considered Perryman to be a health threat.

Perryman says prolonged time in the facility is limiting

Perryman learned that she would be required to stay in the facility until June 21 when Kennedy’s order was slipped under her door on Monday.

“I was appalled,” she said in an interview. “I was horrified that the secretary, who is not a physician, would override the doctor and violate the law just to keep me locked up.”

Perryman, 47, who lives primarily in Ecuador but keeps a permanent home with friends in Florida, said that she wishes to finish her quarantine in Florida, where she would have more freedom and be able to cook her own food and move around either her home or a rental property.

Perryman likened it to staying in an airport hotel room for 23 or 24 hours a day. Sometimes she is allowed to go to the roof of the facility for an hour under the observation of armed guards. She receives meals twice daily in her room from nurses wearing gloves, masks and face shields. It feels like a “prison,” she said.

Her quarantine was voluntary, until the order came

Perryman was a passenger on a cruise ship traveling in the South Atlantic which became the setting of an unusual hantavirus outbreak that killed three. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including Perryman and 17 others who were evacuated to the Nebraska quarantine unit on May 11.

Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings, but the hantavirus that caused the outbreak, called the Andes virus, may be able to spread between people in rare cases.

Because symptoms of hantavirus have taken as long as 42 days to appear in previous outbreaks, the 18 were to be monitored for the development of symptoms until the end of the day on Sunday, June 21.

At first, the passengers were asked — not told — to stay at the Nebraska facility. At the time, Perryman said, she was assured by a CDC official that she was there voluntarily. At his urging, and at the urging of the facility’s medical director, she agreed to stay until May 22 to protect public health because some medical experts say most people who develop symptoms do so within the first three weeks. But she was later told she could not leave on that date, even though she did not have any symptoms.

Perryman and one other passenger then received orders from U.S. health officials requiring them to quarantine at the facility until May 31. Quarantine orders, which can be enforced with fines and prison time, are a rare legal step that can be taken if someone objects to a public health request. The initial orders were signed by the CDC’s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Perryman said she was told that after May 31 she could quarantine in Florida as long as the state agreed to the surveillance and in-person checks. When Florida refused, federal officials ordered Perryman to stay put in Nebraska.

She is not there alone. On Tuesday, eight of the passengers were still at the Nebraska facility. The others went home earlier this month, after their states agreed to the monitoring plan.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Kennedy raised concerns about governments imposing mass quarantines, saying in an interview for his former organization Children’s Health Defense that “quarantine kills people too” and that the costs of lockdowns should be debated.

“This seems to me to drip with hypocrisy, because the whole premise of Secretary Kennedy’s MAHA movement is medical freedom. And here they’re willing to detain somebody against their wishes,” Gostin said.

____

AP video journalist Shelby Lum in New York and AP writer Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.

____

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.