Right now, at the explicit direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself, Angela Perryman, an American exposed to hantavirus on a cruise ship, is being forced to stay in quarantine against her will at a federal hospital facility in Nebraska.

In keeping Perryman locked up, Kennedy ignored his own medical experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who said Perryman could quarantine at home. But, Kennedy, in his infinite public health wisdom, overruled that.

Now, a CDC medical review by practicing doctors found that, while Perryman could have contracted the virus despite showing no symptoms, the risk of developing symptoms decreased during the 42-day quarantine period recommended by the World Health Organization. That lengthy stay is necessary because hantavirus has a long incubation period.

Perryman’s 42 days were up this past Sunday. But she’s still locked up.

Kennedy, in his order extending Perryman’s involuntary confinement, simply decided that she was infected based on, well, vibes, and therefore she had to stay locked up.

Other patients have been allowed to quarantine at home, but Perryman ostensibly cannot because Florida, where Perryman lives, refused to meet the surveillance requirements demanded by the CDC. People quarantining at home are literally under constant surveillance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to ensure they comply with quarantine orders.

Initially, the CDC even told states that they had to post a law enforcement officer outside people’s homes, a genuinely dystopian, thuggish thing to do. Health officials later decided that the 24/7 monitoring could be done by a healthcare worker, which doesn’t really make this any less terrible.

It was inevitable that the CDC, ravaged by mass firings, currently without a Senate-confirmed leader, and constantly in the grip of the weirdest, worst anti-science vaccine skeptics, would be utterly unable to rise to the occasion if there was a public health crisis. Indeed, the only thing that Kennedy seems to be doing here is enforcing a quarantine with the full might of the government behind him.

Kennedy has stacked HHS with people who cut their teeth on COVID conspiracies, just like he did. And you know what Kennedy really hated? COVID lockdowns.

In 2022, he compared lockdowns in the United States to Nazi Germany, except somehow they were worse?

“Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said during a Washington rally against vaccine mandates.

Y I K E S.

After President Donald Trump tapped him to be health secretary, Kennedy justified the mass firings at the CDC, saying the agency responded “miserably during COVID when its disastrous, nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools, caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science, and heightened economic inequality.”

But where COVID lockdowns were the most unjust thing that ever happened, hantavirus lockdowns are totes cool. Indeed, the Trump administration has taken an extremely hard line on both Ebola and hantavirus, lockdowns that go far beyond COVID restrictions and previous outbreaks—and Kennedy is leading the way.

For conservatives, every accusation is a confession, and that’s crystal clear here. The Biden administration did not demand 24/7 surveillance of people who had COVID. Biden’s CDC did not put people in solitary confinement, which is how one person described the hantavirus lockup, saying he became so distraught that he went on a hunger strike and was suicidal.

Perryman described her confinement as being locked alone in a room at the medical facility 23 hours per day, where she can only go outside for one hour on the roof of the building.

Kennedy is a eugenicist freak who believes that contracting diseases is some sort of moral failing, so it’s perhaps not all that surprising that he sees no problem with locking someone up indefinitely regardless of whether there is any danger.

So now Perryman has no idea when she will be released. Call Kennedy’s philosophy “lockups for thee, but not for me.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos