It seems some African nations have grown tired of the Trump administration treating them like lab rats.

The Trump regime’s interests in African nations over the past year seem to have been limited to letting its allies plunder resources from those countries or using them as a dumping ground for deportees targeted by the president’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown. This posture from Trump and company, in which the U.S. attempts to impose its will on African nations, differs from the Biden administration’s approach, which sought to reset diplomatic ties by taking a less paternalistic, less exploitative stance.

And we’re starting to see what it looks like when African nations bristle at the type of relationship Trump is trying to foster. The latest example came on Friday with a Kenyan court’s decision to block a U.S. plan to send Americans there to quarantine when they pose an Ebola risk.  

The Washington Post reported:

A Kenyan court Friday suspended a Trump administration plan to establish a makeshift field hospital in Kenya to quarantine and treat Americans exposed to or infected with Ebola. 

The court, citing a threat to life, issued its ruling on the day U.S. officials said the facility would begin operating. It has capacity for up to 50 patients potentially exposed during the growing Ebola outbreak, which is centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The article continued:

Authorities say suspected Ebola cases have passed 1,000, with nearly 250 suspected deaths. The court ruling, which is temporary pending fuller consideration of the case June 2, nonetheless halted a key part of the strategy from President Donald Trump’s administration for handling Americans exposed to Ebola overseas.

As the Post explained, the court’s decision “puts added focus on ethical questions related to the administration’s apparent unwillingness to let ill or exposed Americans return home for treatment.”

MS NOW’s Julia Jester reported last week that the administration had undercut the global readiness to fight Ebola by gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, an organization Elon Musk openly bragged about destroying. And now, after putting African nations — and consequently the rest of the world — at risk by undercutting the ability to respond to health crises, the U.S. is looking to Kenya and other African nations to fend off the danger. And despite the terrible optics surrounding the Trump administration’s (thus far) lackluster Ebola response, the Post, citing a senior administration official, reported Thursday that the proposal to quarantine American patients in Kenya was, according to one senior administration official, rooted in medical and logistical concerns rather than politics.

It’s no surprise Kenya isn’t eager to stand in the breach. Dr. Uché Blackstock, an emergency physician who advocates for health equity and antiracist healthcare policies, said in a social media post on Friday that the proposal was troubling for several reasons, not the least of which being that Kenya, as of Friday, had not reported any Ebola cases. Blackstock also raised concerns about why the administration was choosing Kenya for quarantine when in the past the U.S. brought American Ebola patients home to “specialized biocontainment units equipped to safely care for them.”

The proposal might have been received differently were it not for previous attempts by the U.S. to use public health crises as an opportunity to extract things from African nations. The Trump administration withheld health aid in an effort to force African countries to give the U.S. valuable resources. It reportedly plans to keep HIV aid from Zambia, for example, as leverage to extract minerals. Backed by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration also sought to conduct a vaccine study in Guinea-Bissau, a proposal that garnered comparisons to the racist Tuskegee Experiment. But much like the court in Kenya on Trump’s quarantine plans, officials there halted the study, with the foreign minister saying, “It’s not going to happen, period.”

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