'The Virus Has A Big Head Start': Former CDC Director Warns Ebola Outbreak Could Be 'Devastating'

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]The World Health Organization is expressing concern over the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. Authorities have reported more than 130 suspected deaths from the virus and at least 500 suspected cases. I'm Maggie McGrath, senior editor at Forbes, and joining us to discuss these developments is Dr. Tom Frieden. He's a physician, the former director of the CDC, and the founder and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit focusing on action against some of the world's deadliest healthcare threats. Dr. Frieden, thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:35]Thank you.

[00:00:36]Now, you are currently in Geneva at the annual gathering for the World Health Organization, so I want to start there.

[00:00:43]What's the mood on the ground and how concerned are you and other officials about this Ebola outbreak?

[00:00:50]Well, this is really a potentially devastating outbreak. If you compare this with prior outbreaks, by the time our um response has started, there are many more cases than in any prior outbreak.

[00:01:05]So, in this case, the virus has a big head start, and Ebola is really hard to control. You have to find every contact.

[00:01:14]You have to trace every chain of transmission. You have to make sure that every healthcare worker is safe. And if you have one gap in any of those things, the outbreak can continue for weeks or months more. It's difficult even in the best of circumstances, and the place where this is occurring is not the best of places. It's one of the hardest places in the world to work. It's insecure. It's remote. It's really hard to control Ebola, and it's virtually impossible to control Ebola when people are shooting at you. So, we have a series of big problems, so it's very concerning.

[00:01:50]You say that the virus has a head start.

[00:01:52]Is that because of the geography in which this outbreak started, or is it because of the symptoms and the nature of this particular variant?

[00:02:00]This outbreak was identified much later than any prior outbreak.

[00:02:05]In the past, when there's been an outbreak, public health has learned about it within days or weeks when there were one, two, three, or in the case of the West Africa Ebola epidemic a decade ago, there were about 40 or 50 cases by the time it was identified. By the time this outbreak was identified and response started, there were more like 400 or 500 cases. So, at the outset, it's 10 times as large, and every one of those cases is someone who might have spread Ebola to other people who may become sick in the future. They need to be isolated.

[00:02:42]They need to be quarantined so that if they become sick, they don't infect others, and they can be rapidly cared for. I met, for example, with leaders from Uganda. The The top leadership is remaining in Uganda because of this.

[00:02:55]They have two cases in Kampala, the capital city, both among travelers who had returned or had come from DRC.

[00:03:02]And so, this is This is a real challenge. Also, there's a lot of uh travel over the border, and this risks multi-country spread. So, this is um a very concerning outbreak. It drives home why it's so important to have health systems that can find and stop outbreaks before they cross borders. And it's happening at a time when healthcare services are really already overstretched and underfunded. Um you know, this is This is a a bad time for public health cuz, quite frankly, in the past 16 to 18 months, many of our health protections have been weakened.

[00:03:42]Now, you can criticize the World Health Organization all you like, but there's no alternative. There's no other entity that could do the coordination that it's doing for the hantavirus cluster or for the Ebola epidemic. And when I led the CDC a decade ago, we worked very closely with the World Health Organization so that they would be more able to respond. In the past decade, they've greatly strengthened their ability to respond, and they're essential. So, uh one of the reasons I come to Geneva for the World Health Assembly is you have 100 health ministers here, and it's possible to meet with different delegations to learn great things that are being done around the world, and to share best practices among different groups. The US has walked away from the World Health Organization. You don't re- fix something by leaving it, you fix it by fixing it. It's defunded the organization, which has thrown it into a fiscal crisis, so they have fewer staff to respond. And at the same time, two other things have happened. It's kind of a one-two-three punch. You've uh weakened the World Health Organization through the actions of this administration. You've also greatly weakened the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And I do want to be very clear. The doctors, the scientists, are working hard there. Uh the current acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, seems to be doing a good job, but he's a part-time director also trying to run the National Institutes of Health. And I can tell you from firsthand experience, running the CDC, even in the best of times, is a full-time job. And during a major Ebola epidemic, it's more than a full-time job. And you've had CDC lose thousands of staff, and a current proposal from the US State Department would basically decimate the CDC's ability to work around the world, and undermine a huge bipartisan success, which is the PEPFAR program to treat people living with HIV.

[00:05:31]At the same time, you have the abrupt departure of USAID, which has thrown many thousands of health care workers out of work, and created great problems in countries around the world. So, this is coming at a really bad time, and it's a bad epidemic.