Kenya health minister halts US Ebola facility after contempt ruling

Aden Duale, Kenya's health minister, stood before a judge on Tuesday and promised to stop. The court had already ordered him to halt construction of a US-run Ebola quarantine facility at Laikipia air base, a military installation about 125 miles northeast of Nairobi. He had ignored that order. Now, facing contempt charges, Duale told the judge he had commanded an immediate end to all work—no more construction, no more site preparation, nothing related to the facility pending further court direction.

The judge, Patricia Nyaundi Mande, accepted his apology and discharged him with a warning. But the timing of his capitulation revealed the depth of the crisis. Three Kenyans had already died in protests against the facility. Two were killed on June 1. Another was shot dead by police on June 9. The country had erupted in anger over a decision made in May to build a quarantine center for American citizens evacuated from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ebola was spreading with terrifying speed.

The outbreak in the DRC had confirmed more than 1,000 cases and killed more than 250 people by mid-June. Uganda, across the border, had recorded 20 cases and two deaths. The virus circulating was Bundibugyo, a rare strain with no vaccine and no approved treatment. Modeling from the US Centers for Disease Control suggested this could become the largest Ebola outbreak in history, surpassing the 2014-2016 West African epidemic that infected more than 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000.

Yet Kenya had never recorded a single case of Ebola. The facility was designed to hold about 50 isolation beds and be staffed by American medical personnel. Rights groups had challenged it from the start, arguing the government had developed the plan in secret, without public consultation. When the high court issued its initial order to stop construction last month, the government kept going anyway. Satellite imagery from June 22 showed structures still being built—tents, paved areas, equipment arriving by air. US officials and diplomats confirmed to Reuters that specialist staff and medical supplies continued flowing into the airbase even after the court's order.

The opposition to the facility ran deeper than fear of disease. "If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya," said Dr. Davji Atellah of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. Critics pointed out that during previous Ebola outbreaks, the US had allowed its own citizens to return home for treatment. This time, American officials said they would not permit anyone with active Ebola infection to enter the United States. In May, an American doctor who contracted the virus in the DRC was flown to Germany for care, along with his wife and four children. The message was clear: Kenya was being asked to accept what America would not.

There was also the matter of money and history. The US had promised $13.5 million to support Kenya's Ebola preparedness efforts, but many Kenyans saw the arrangement as carrying echoes of colonialism—a wealthy foreign power using African territory for its own purposes. President William Ruto had defended the facility as the right decision, and Duale had argued in court that fears of Ebola spreading beyond the quarantine center were "scientifically unfounded." But the court had sided with the petitioners, and now the minister had been forced to back down.

What happens next remains uncertain. The court has ordered construction halted pending a full hearing on the rights groups' petition. But the US State Department had already signaled its commitment, saying on social media in late May that it was "optimistic we can resolve objections." The question is whether Duale's court-ordered promise to stop will hold, or whether the pressure from Washington and the logic of pandemic preparedness will eventually override Kenyan public opinion and judicial authority.