A Florida woman who was exposed to hantavirus while aboard a cruise liner last month remains at a quarantine facility in Nebraska despite a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that she be allowed to finish her isolation at home.
Angela Perryman, 47, received an order on Monday, signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., extending her federal quarantine at a facility in Omaha, “unless modified or rescinded” by a subsequent federal directive.
“Ms. Perryman may request that the secretary rescind the federal quarantine,” the order obtained by Newsweek reads. “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.”
Newsweek reached out to CDC and HHS officials via email early Tuesday for comment.
Perryman, one of 18 MV Hondius passengers who were flown back to the United States on May 11 and taken to the Omaha facility, accused Kennedy of “ignoring the medical review” by the CDC, which recommended Thursday that she be allowed to complete the remainder of a 42-day isolation period at home.
She is one of 10 passengers still at the facility, but the only one to challenge the order.
“The law requires the quarantine conditions to be the least restrictive necessary to maintain public health,” Perryman told Newsweek on Tuesday. “Even the CDC’s own reviewer says that Florida’s plan is adequate and meets that standard. At this point, the federal government is just ignoring the law. It feels like retaliation for me speaking out.”
Perryman, who has not tested positive for the virus, said her experience “should terrify” every American.
“If they can do this to me, they can literally do it to anyone,” she said. “There’s a purpose-built federal detention center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to hold American citizens under these administrative orders, and what’s happened to me demonstrates clearly that the checks and balances that were built into the law don’t work. There is no judicial review and the CDC/HHS now lacks the integrity to follow the law without a judge forcing them.”
In a May 28 letter by the Florida Department of Health to CDC officials, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo indicated that Florida planned to issue a voluntary quarantine agreement for Perryman to isolate at home without other occupants, with daily monitoring via telehealth, including temperature checks and symptom assessments.
“At this time the assessment of the Florida Department of Health is that it is not necessary to implement the federal conditions of 24/7 continuous surveillance and twice in-person monitoring of the individual at their residence,” the letter obtained by Newsweek reads.
Perryman, a retiree who splits her time between Florida and Ecuador, told Newsweek: “If they can put me in here and ignore the law, they can grab any citizen from anywhere and lock them up here, without judicial review, even when the doctors clearly say it’s not necessary. If you sit on a pew beside someone coughing, you could be next. If your child is in a school where there’s a measles case, there’s nothing stopping the government from just grabbing him and locking him up away from you, and you have absolutely no recourse.”
The order to keep Perryman at the facility in Omaha “flies in the face of the findings of the medical reviewer,” her attorney, Steven Hyman, told The New York Times on Monday.
Perryman, meanwhile, says she’s struggling to maintain her composure while stuck in isolation.
“I’m barely hanging on, at this point,” she told Newsweek. “You don’t expect your own government to just ignore the law and imprison you.”
Read the full article here
