A deadly disease is outrunning every past outbreak of its kind, and Washington just moved to keep it off American soil.
America’s biggest airlines want the brakes pumped.
And Donald Trump warned about this exact loophole back when Barack Obama still ran the show.
A One-Page Form Has the Airline Lobby Crying Foul
Starting November 3, every passenger boarding an international flight to the United States has to sign a statement swearing he or she hasn’t set foot in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the previous 21 days, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That covers everybody. American citizens, green card holders, flight crews, and folks who only change planes in the US all have to fill it out, even if they’ve never been anywhere near the DRC.
The CDC picked 21 days because that’s the longest stretch Ebola can hide in a body before symptoms show up. Travelers can sign on paper or online, and airlines have to hang on to every form for at least 42 days after the flight lands.
Anyone who spent time in the DRC inside that window, even a layover at the airport, can’t board a US-bound flight without a government exemption. Lie on the form, and the CDC says prosecution and fines could follow.
Airlines for America, the trade group behind American, Delta, Southwest, United, and JetBlue, fired off a letter dated October 26 asking the agency to back off. The group said it supports the CDC’s goals, then asked for “a more proportionate and measured U.S. response” aimed at the affected areas and the people who’ve actually been there.
It also wants more time. “Changes to check-in systems, digital signatures, station procedures and training cannot readily be completed in the allotted time,” the group wrote.
And it wants carve-outs for its own crews and for US military charters, arguing that existing paperwork already tracks where those people have been.
The International Air Transport Association, which speaks for more than 370 airlines worldwide, joined the pile. “It is unreasonable for the U.S. government to require all airlines serving the U.S. market to modify their procedures to accommodate the collection of attestations from each individual (passenger and crew) flying to the United States in less than two weeks,” IATA wrote, according to Reuters.
The Bug Driving This Has No Vaccine and No Cure
The numbers out of Central Africa explain the hurry. The CDC counted 10,193 confirmed cases and 4,960 confirmed deaths as of October 27, and the agency says this outbreak is spreading substantially faster than any Ebola outbreak before it. It now ranks as the second-largest on record.
A rarer cousin of the familiar strain, called Bundibugyo virus, drives this one. No approved vaccine or treatment exists for it, because the shots and antibody drugs built after the 2014 West Africa crisis target a different strain.
It has already slipped out. Kenya and Nigeria reported their first cases in October, and back in June, France confirmed a case in a doctor who came home from a humanitarian mission in the DRC.
Dr Tyler Evans, a California infectious disease physician who worked Ebola responses in both West Africa and the DRC, didn’t sugarcoat it for Fox News Digital. “This is the second-largest outbreak of Ebola in history. So this is very serious,” he said.
He called the CDC’s move “a step in the right direction,” pointing out that screening catches people who don’t look sick yet. But Americans tend to treat Ebola as somebody else’s problem, Evans said. “When it comes to infectious diseases . . . microbes don’t sort of respect boundaries.”
The CDC still rates the risk to the American public as low, and no US cases have turned up in this outbreak. Good. That’s the whole idea.
Dallas Already Showed What a Polite Questionnaire Is Worth
In September 2014, a Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan filled out an airport Ebola screening questionnaire before leaving Monrovia. Liberian authorities later said he answered no to questions about contact with Ebola patients. He showed no symptoms when he boarded.
Duncan flew from Liberia to Brussels, then on to Washington, DC, and finally Dallas, arriving on September 20, 2014. He died in a Dallas hospital on October 8. Two nurses who treated him, Nina Pham and Amber Vinson, caught the virus. Both survived.
Notice the route. No regularly scheduled direct flights connected the hardest-hit countries to the US back then. Duncan connected through Europe like thousands of other travelers, which is exactly why a rule aimed only at flights out of Kinshasa would miss somebody who changes planes in Paris or Addis Ababa.
That’s the logic behind making everyone sign. The airline lobby calls it too broad. But the virus doesn’t check which city printed the boarding pass.
Donald Trump spent that whole fall hammering Obama to stop the flights. “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” he wrote on Twitter in August 2014. Obama never imposed a ban, and the experts and their media friends treated Trump like a crank for asking.
Then two Dallas nurses got sick.
Critics are already lining up against this version too. Celine Gounder, the infectious disease doctor who sat on Joe Biden’s COVID advisory board during his 2020 transition, wrote that “Thomas Eric Duncan wasn’t stopped by a travel ban. He was failed by an ER.”
She has half a point. Texas Health Presbyterian sent Duncan home the first time he showed up sick. But hospital officials also said at the time that he told them he hadn’t been around anyone who was ill. The bad answers came first. The ER mistake came second.
And here’s where a sharp reader might pump the brakes. A signed form only works if the person signing it tells the truth, and Duncan’s paperwork proved that much. The difference now is a federal penalty hanging over the pen, which is more than Liberia’s questionnaire ever carried.
Same Airlines, Very Different Tune in 2021
Plenty of Americans who lived through 2020 flinch at any new government health rule, and they earned that skepticism the hard way. Washington locked down healthy people, shuttered schools, and forced shots on workers who never asked for them.
But one question about whether a traveler stood in an active Ebola zone in the last three weeks isn’t a lockdown. It doesn’t touch anybody’s body. It doesn’t keep a single healthy American home, and the order runs out on December 18, 2026, unless officials extend it.
Funny thing about the carriers now pleading for flexibility. They spent 2021 enforcing Washington’s federal mask mandate at 30,000 feet, kicking passengers off planes and slapping some on internal no-fly lists over a piece of cloth. Nobody at the trade group seemed too worried back then about whether the rule was proportionate.
Now Washington wants a checkbox, and suddenly the check-in software can’t keep up.
Give the airlines this much: a dozen days is a short runway for retooling systems that move millions of people. The crew exemption request isn’t crazy either, since flight records already show where pilots and flight attendants have been.
So the fight is really over the calendar, not the need. Read the IATA letter closely and the complaint centers on “less than two weeks,” not on whether a killer with no cure deserves a screening.
And after four years of Joe Biden waving millions of illegal aliens across the southern border with little idea who they were or where they’d been, a federal government that finally asks travelers one plain question about an outbreak zone deserves something better than a lobbying letter.
Whether the CDC holds the November 3 date or hands the industry its extension comes next. Fox News Digital reached out to the CDC and IATA for comment.
Trump, for his part, already said his piece on this fight once. In October 2014, after a doctor returning from West Africa tested positive in New York City, he posted, “I have been saying for weeks for President Obama to stop the flights from West Africa. So simple, but he refused.”
Sources: Fox News Digital, “Deadly disease sparks new CDC rule for US-bound flyers as major airlines seek delay”; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Ebola Outbreak: Current Situation”; Reuters; Paddle Your Own Kanoo, “Airlines Say the CDC’s New Ebola Attestation Requirement For International Travelers Is Disproportionate And Unworkable”; InsideFlyer, “CDC requires declarations on international flights to U.S.”; Yahoo News, “Deadly Ebola Outbreak Leads to Tighter U.S. Entry Rules from CDC”; Contagion Live; Euronews, “First Ebola case confirmed in France, health ministry says”; AFP; MPR News/NPR, “Liberia to prosecute U.S. Ebola patient for allegedly lying on questionnaire”; PolitiFact; FiveThirtyEight, “Why An Ebola Flight Ban Wouldn’t Work”; Slate; Mother Jones; TheGrio; Celine Gounder.