Why This Ebola Outbreak Could Be One of the Worst

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]This Ebola outbreak could turn out to be one of the worst ever. And at least one of the reasons for that is the lack of US leadership. To understand why people are so alarmed, just take a look at this photo from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the virus is spreading right now. And what's striking is what's missing. Normally, if you see people dealing with a suspected Ebola case, you'd see them wearing full body gear. And these people are barely wearing face masks. I've spoken to people who are on the ground right now and they say that lack of protective gear is the biggest problem they're facing. We know what it takes to stop an outbreak, even an Ebola outbreak. You need good testing. You need a vaccine.

[00:00:40]You need treatments. You need a good healthc care infrastructure. You need ability to do contact tracing. And you need genetic analysis. That's working well so far. Scientists have worked very quickly to analyze the virus. And so far they seem to think that it has not really changed since the last time it was seen. But without US support, a lot of things have been weakened. In past outbreaks, US A was on the ground making sure that protective gear was available to people within hours of learning of an outbreak. But this time, US A doesn't exist anymore. They would have been there to make sure that lab samples were being transported in the correct way.

[00:01:14]They would have helped with contact tracing. They would have helped train healthcare workers. and CDC would have been there to provide medical expertise to make sure that the science was first rate to communicate with international partners on things like vaccines and therapeutics and to make sure that the best medical guidance was available to everybody. But CDC has been stripped of thousands of workers including hundreds who worked on infectious diseases. Now they do have a country office in Congo still but my reporting shows that they have seven unfilled positions including some top leadership positions. Those are people that would have been extremely helpful in an outbreak like this. The US has also cut funding to the World Health Organization and to a lot of the international partners who are doing work on the ground. So the organizations that have done this for decades that know how to deal with an Ebola outbreak are all underresourced and understaffed because the US is no longer part of the World Health Organization. US officials did not find out about the outbreak until 9 days after all other countries knew about it. Once the US found out about this, they did start to mobilize some money and the State Department has said that it is already providing $23 million in assistance to the countries that are affected. They have said that they are committed to giving all of the resources required to contain this outbreak. But even if the money gets there quickly, the people who actually know how to do this work are missing in large numbers. I've talked to several people who have worked on past Ebola responses who are watching horrified as these case numbers go up and knowing that the things that they would have been doing to help are probably not happening right now.