A passenger from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship has said she is being held in quarantine away from her home against her will and despite the recommendations of a medical review by the CDC.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long decried what he has deemed the overreach of public health measures, signed an order Monday requiring that Angela Perryman remain at a Nebraska quarantine unit despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying it was safe for her to return to her home state of Florida under certain monitoring conditions.
Perryman, a retiree who loves to photograph wildlife, was a passenger on the Hondius cruise ship, which became the center of a hantavirus outbreak in May that killed three passengers. Perryman understands that she needs to quarantine, her attorney Steven Hyman said, but would like to do so from her home in Florida.
Five other passengers were allowed to leave the Nebraska facility two weeks ago to quarantine in their home states, including New York and Oregon, to finish out the recommended 42-day period. But Perryman’s efforts to do so have been rebuffed as she has become entangled in a tussle between the federal government and her home state.
Federal officials are insisting that she be monitored daily in person and that a “guard” be stationed outside her house, Hyman said, but Florida has refused to meet these requirements. The state’s surgeon general is a proponent of “medical freedom.”
Legal measures are unlikely to remedy anything before Perryman’s quarantine runs out, Hyman said. Perryman said that is set to end Sunday afternoon.
Perryman said she’s “barely keeping it together” as she’s confined to a room for 23 hours a day. Her meals are delivered by staff in full protective gear, including face shields and gowns.
“This should terrify every American,” Perryman said. “They assert they have the right to do that even if the medical reviewer says that should not be done. They can hold you anyway because they just did it with me.”
Kennedy’s order under the Public Health Service Act declared that in Perryman’s case the “requirements for Federal quarantine continue to be met,” suggesting that she should stay in quarantine. The order deemed her isolation “necessary to protect public health” but did not elaborate on the specifics of the risks she might pose.
While Perryman has the right to request that the federal quarantine be rescinded, Kennedy wrote, “any such request must be based on a showing of significant, new, or changed facts or medical evidence that raise a genuine issue as to whether the individual should continue to be subject to Federal quarantine.”
The health secretary issued his decision after a Thursday report by Michael Bell, the quarantine medical reviewer at the CDC. Bell said that while there is a reasonable belief that Perryman could be infected with a quarantinable communicable disease, the federal order should be rescinded if Florida health authorities agreed to monitoring and an assistance plan in the event that she developed symptoms.
“This less restrictive alternative of continued quarantine at Ms. Perryman’s residence with oversight by the Florida Department of Public Health would adequately serve to protect public health,” he wrote.
But the report also said that the Florida surgeon general wrote to the CDC stating that the state health authorities did not believe it was necessary to implement round-the-clock surveillance and in-person monitoring twice a day at Perryman’s home.
“The disagreement between CDC and Florida over the appropriate monitoring conditions forms a central dispute in this medical review,” the report said.
White House officials had pushed for aggressive home monitoring and 24/7 stationing of an armed guard outside the homes of those quarantined, The Washington Post has reported. But public health officials have repeatedly pushed back against these types of restrictive measures and noted that some top administration officials had harshly criticized similar measures that were implemented to contain the coronavirus during the pandemic.
Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor who directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for National and Global Health Law and has worked with the CDC on quarantine rules, said he was shocked by the “hypocrisy” from Kennedy.
“The whole MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement and Secretary Kennedy’s mantra is that he’s for medical freedom, and yet when somebody has their liberty at stake and there’s a wide consensus of medical opinion that they don’t pose a risk to the public if they quarantine at home, it just makes a mockery of the whole idea of medical freedom,” Gostin said.
He noted that the administration is taking a similar tack on Ebola, with the push to keep potentially infected Americans out of the country.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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