EBOLA: CDC Asks For VOLUNTEERS TO SCREEN AIRPORTS

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]So, wanted to bring everybody up to date on this rapid spread of Ebola centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We can put this up on the screen in terms of our own country's response. So, the CDC is seeking volunteers from their staff to go do Ebola screenings at airports as that outbreak response expands. Um, there's uh a lot to get to in ter in terms of the US response that I'll save for a moment. First, let's go ahead and take a look at where the Ebola outbreak is centered and uh just how dire the concerns are here. So, we've had obviously a number of Ebola outbreaks. Um unfortunately, not unusual. This already though is the third worst outbreak that we have seen and you can see here on the map where the uh worst spread is. You've had already hundreds of deaths, 223 deaths that have been linked to this outbreak.

[00:00:55]You've had 900 suspected cases. Remember this is an area where it is very difficult to get actual real information. Um there is a lot of skepticism of the local population in terms of aid workers coming in. Uh so it is hard to know exactly what the case number is but we can see the way that it has expanded. The other problem is that it appears it was detected quite late where there had already been significant spread before the World Health Organization and other global health organizations or uh you know the US health organizations detected that this Ebola strain was um was there and was spreading. There's a few reasons for that. Number one, it is a more of a rare strain of Ebola. It's not the most common one. So, it wasn't the one that they were routinely testing for. That's number one. Number two, um you know, you have a situation where we completely defunded USID. So, a lot of our aid workers who had been there, who may have been in the in an ability to do like an early warning of, oh, I hear that there's some weird thing that is spreading here, they weren't there. So, that may also have hindered the response. And then you also have, you know, this is obviously a war torn area.

[00:02:07]This part of the DRC is kind of like a rebel stronghold. It's far from the capital. So the fact of the remote location of where this began to develop is also part of the problem. But health experts are saying that this is actually the most rapid spread that they've seen.

[00:02:22]So even though it's not yet the worst outbreak, it has a lot of momentum, which is why this is so um so disturbing and why people are paying so much attention to it. Let's go and put B3 up on the screen here. You can see that Uganda has also closed its border with Congo where suspected cases of this rare Ebola type are surging. Um they ordered that closure. This is actually in defiance of what the World Health Organization had recommended. And I'll tell you why. Their their view is that this border is extremely porous. There's um you know paths that go back and walking paths that go back and forth across this border across the entire length of it. And so their view, the World Health Organization's view, is if you close down the official border crossings, you're just going to push people to those informal crossings and it's actually going to make it more difficult to detect the spread and be able to stop um you know, stop this virus from spreading. So that's kind of what we know about the uh you know, the extent of the cases here. But there's all kinds of problems in terms of the response. I can put B4 up on the screen.

[00:03:28]You've had a number of instances where family members in this instance they stormed an Ebola hospital demanding the return of the dead. One of the things that's been in instituted in the Congo is that you have to use, you know, official authorities to conduct burials because that is one of the ways that the um that Ebola is primarily spread. It has to be direct contact with bodily fluids. And so the the you know the burial rights are one of the places that they're really trying to get a hold on.

[00:03:57]And I was doing I was telling you soccer I was doing kind of like a deep dive into okay well why are people so skeptical because you also have aid workers that are like getting attacked who are coming in trying to spread spread information and trying to you know trying to help out. you had a uh doctors without borders tents that were set on fire where you had a number of suspected infected patients who escaped and uh it's kind of has a lot of parallels but in a more extreme form of like the you know vaccine and other medical skepticism here in the US which tends to be among populations that have been directly abused and have reason to be skeptical of the medical establishment in Congo you can imagine that is taken to an extreme because you've had all kinds of outsiders come in to basically like steal their res natural resources and wealth. So when you have people coming in from the outside that you haven't seen before um telling you you've got to do all these things that you don't want to do, there's a natural resistance. Another reason is because this is a part of the Congo that is like a rebel stronghold.

[00:04:55]And so if the official government is telling you like, oh no, you've got this outbreak and you've got to do all these special things, there's a natural skepticism there. And then again, because we defunded USA ID, so we don't have these health workers who have been on the ground, who have built that sort of trust, now they see all of these health workers coming in and they're like, "Oh, you lost your payday, so now this is your chance to get back on the gravy train." There's all kinds of rumors that they get paid. The health workers get paid per case that's identified, etc. So, there's significant skepticism. There's yeah there's significant skepticism that Ebola even is a thing and not just some like invented concoction to further subjugate the population. And again given their history you can understand where they're coming from even though it's incorrect.

[00:05:40]>> I don't know. The more you're talking I'm like maybe I'm on the Congo side here.

[00:05:43]>> You can see why you think that way.

[00:05:46]>> It's not just like oh they're ignorant and they don't get it. It's like no this is a people who have been incredibly abused, traumatized, exploited, etc. So when you suddenly have all these people coming and oh I'm going to save you.

[00:05:57]They're like, "Who are you and what are you really doing here?" So that obviously inhibits >> I mean also you know so first of all like you said I didn't realize uh all of that but I did know about the rebel issue when I was reading about it and how far and how difficult that also makes it. So you have government authorities coming into a rebel area and look I mean I do think what this highlights is this first of all Ebola I'm not worried about this becoming a global pandemic the way CO was. One of the things that we learned a lot during COVID was that why it became so deadly is airborne and the you know the proximity for how or not sorry not why CO spreads so easily not deadly was because it was airborne and it spreads very very easily whereas Ebola literally only spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids and I also isn't it the whole like it actually kills you so fast it's not that easy to spread because it's so deadly to the body. your your ideal for a virus for you know from the virus's perspective is that it is deadly but not in a large proportion of the cases because if you kill the host then you're unlikely to be able to propagate.

[00:06:56]So yes, unfortunately the fact that it is so brutal and so deadly is one of the things that it has going for it in terms of it not spreading too far. But still, you know, for for people in this region and for concerns with global air travel, etc., it's obviously take it very >> seriously. And that's that's another thing we learned about the global the interconnectedness, how easy it is and how often we'll see somebody who you know you're like how could somebody from the Congo end up here? It's like well it's not that hard. You can get there in less than 16 hours like and that's all it took. I remember the last Ebola outbreak that we had multiple doctors and others that were present here in the US. I remember there were cameras on all the hospitals and all those things. I do think I think I think this was an important story for the reason why you let off with which is CDC. And I do think it actually bears out like the genuine dual crisis that we have right now in public health which is first and foremost a significant part of the population. My hand up. The last people I would want in charge are the Biden era people who bungled the last public health disaster. A significant reason why the Jay Batacharia and Marty Mackery and RFK Jr. I mean literally I think the number one reason why RFK Jr. is the current HHS secretary is because of the COVID response. Now, I'm not also going to sit here and say they've done a whole bangup job, right? Because that hasn't happened either. And so, what we've seen is a significant significant verified and in my opinion appropriate skepticism of the broad public health establishment. I mean, Dr. Tedros from WHA is the same co guy, right? I remember uh all of the nonsense that they were spewing around over COVID, many of the lies. Um but then also we have to deal with well, but we also have now these maha guys who are in charge.

[00:08:35]They've defined it. doesn't seem like they're all that competent either. So, we have a crisis of competence, I think, on literally all levels here in the United States when we're facing now a genuine disaster potentially here with Ebola. And people are going to freak out. That's one of the reasons we're covering it early. I remember I mean, do you remember 2014 with Obama, the Holy It was a national story. It was wall to cover wall. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot. Yeah.

[00:08:59]So, it was wall to wall coverage. guy coming in and everyone's, you know, cameras tracking him from the airport.

[00:09:06]>> I remember I freaked out. I went to the same bowling alley as one of the guys uh who had was a doctor at Ebola and they just shut the whole bowling alley down.

[00:09:14]Oh my god. And we were all like, "Oh my god, we're going to get Ebola, but this is a big thing." Uh I remember. Uh so anyway, we're covering it now for that reason. But this is going to highlight, I think, the same problem is that waring, you know, expert opinion. We don't have a real public health infrastructure here in the United States. RFK Jr. and others are not trusted by a vast swath of the country.

[00:09:33]The others, you know, many of these other docs, I don't trust them either.

[00:09:37]So, you're like, okay, what do we do?

[00:09:39]And then when this hyper politicization, especially with Trump now in charge, I mean, there's there's there's a crisis, I think, of competence and of trust right now in public health, which is look, RFK and others were supposed to restore it. They haven't done so. And I honestly, I think that's part of the tragedy. It's it's part of the reason why people were so upset and concerned about the haunt virus spread as well because I think everyone with three brain cells looks in this and is like if there's another pandemic we're so like in every way. There's no trust. The agencies here have been dismantled.

[00:10:10]They've been doed to death. You've got wildly incompetent people who are in charge. And you can see here too, you know, some of the the fallout of okay, you know, completely dismantling USA ID.

[00:10:22]There are some consequences to that and one of them is that we didn't have people there to be able to identify this spread. Now, like you said, I don't think that this is a grave threat to the US because of the nature of Ebola. Um, you know, it's horrific for the people who are impacted in the region, but as a direct threat to the US, I'm not deeply concerned about it, but it's a warning sign. Okay. Well, what if it wasn't Ebola? What if it was something that spread more easily? What if it was a virus that you know was not so deadly that it killed the host but deadly enough that it's going to kill millions of people like CO did? Um we are not at all prepared to detect that. We're not prepared to be part of the global response. Our own domestic facilities are you know in shambles. The level of population trust is complete and utter uh chaos and disaster. So you know I thought there was a quote here um from a former CDC director who said that it was it's too simplistic to tie the Trump administration action. This is the Axios report, the B6, that it's too simplistic to tie the Trump administration actions to late detection of the virus. But he said dismant dismantlement of USID, withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and deep cuts to the CDC staff delivered what he described as a one, two, three punch to global health architecture. Sort of like climate change where it's very hard to say, okay, this climate event is because of these, you know, this level of temperature rise or whatever. But you can look at the overall framework and say, "Yeah, this probably did not help."

[00:11:47]>> I see. This is I I don't disagree with genuinely a word you're saying. I just I'm not going to sit here and live in a world where USAD was some great functioning organization, right? Or it was like, oh, it was some like it was a moneyaundering organization for the CIA.

[00:11:58]It occasionally also did some good work.

[00:12:00]>> Well, it did both.

[00:12:01]>> Yeah. Right. But >> but there's consequences to, you know, just completely defunding all of that public health architecture.

[00:12:07]>> I don't disagree. I don't disagree. Same with CDC. It's like we shouldn't also live in a world where every CDC bureaucrat was some like incredible public servant. Like no, they massively up the last pandemic. When the CD I will tell you this for me, the way you probably feel about Trump and RFK Jr., I feel that way about both. If I have some masked up freak telling me about what to do with this pandemic, I'm doing a hell of a lot of research this time around.

[00:12:29]Same people are Dr. Fouchy and all these. No, no, no, no. for me to put a mask back on or put some vaccine again in my arm. The amount of skepticism that's going into that is going to be 200 times fold from Dr. Tedrose, from CDC, from anybody. I never thought I would be the person who's sitting here trying to read preprints of pharmaceutical studies, but I am now have to be after what I just lived through. Now, I'm not saying you should sit here and say, "Oh, yeah, RFK, you tell me what to do and I'm going to do."

[00:12:55]No, that's also not the case. But that's the issue I think that we I mean Trump and the HH the revolution of Trump in particular which a lot of us forget now this time around it's been I get it uh in the beginning a large part of it was the Biden skepticism of the way CDC WHO and everybody handled the last pandemic.

[00:13:14]>> That is kind of crazy because Trump was the one who was president during the last pandemic.

[00:13:18]>> Oh, sure. Sure. Well, I'm not I'm not defending him either.

[00:13:21]>> Yeah. I'm just saying like the the rewriting of that is kind of wild since he was the one who was actually president during the the initial outbreak that implemented the initial measures. Biden did a lot to roll all of that back. But um you know I mean I would just say that I I share some of your critique certainly of the the co response especially I mean things like you know once we figured out the school closures is to be the the most cut and dry where once we figured out that okay this is not particularly you know it's it's very unlikely to be deadly to a child and now we can see the learning loss that I mean we still have kids who are recovering especially lower income.

[00:13:57]There's no doubt about that. I would just say, look, as flawed as it was, I would take them every day over what we've got now, which is like completely defunded. RFK Jr. is a maniac crank. Um, and it's to me it's the difference between, okay, if you think about the pharmaceutical industry, which I have a lot of critiques of, and the fact that money is so central to it and the way all of that works and the revolving door, I've got a lot of concerns and problems with all of that. I would trust them a million times over the like snake oil supplement salesman, which is what RFK Jr. will like, you know, pump up all kinds of like bizarre supplements. Those have no testing. Those have no efficacy.

[00:14:38]They can like lie to you directly and there's effectively no regulation.

[00:14:42]Pharma can lie to you.

[00:14:43]>> No, but there are at least you have to like go through clinical trials and there is a process and the thing usually works it, you know, the way that it's supposed to. I would trust that million times over the supplement industry and the snake oil salesman which is effectively what we've I do think it is and which is effectively what we put in charge public health >> apparatus no see the current the previous CDC I mean think about all the lies from masking to the vaccine to the booster shots the mandates that were put in place I mean the vaccine didn't work like period end of story it was okay not in the way that they said it was possibleization that's not what they said is out there saying that if you get your child circumcised it's going to give them autism. Okay, that's what we're dealing with now. Sager, >> yeah, I am Am I saying?

[00:15:26]>> And all the infectious disease specialists have been, you know, all of that has been dismantled.

[00:15:30]>> I didn't mean for this to turn into this, but like don't forget we had the same public health authority said it's because racism is a virus. It's okay for people to go outside and to protest. But for if you have a mass protest or whatever that you're actually violating public health. I remember a lot of this stuff. I remember the CDC sex freak who was literally out there having uh vaccine mandates while engaged in gay bondage porn while posting it on Z. Like let's not forget who some of the freakazoids who were in the previous administ over that.

[00:15:56]>> No, I'm saying both are okay. But this is worse.

[00:15:59]>> Uh no, I wouldn't say it's worse.

[00:16:01]>> It is absolutely worse. I think uh it is a mess. They've accomplished nothing.

[00:16:05]All they've done is dismantle.

[00:16:06]>> You're ignoring the disasters of the last public health apparatus that exists. I am not ignoring those disasters. I was here with you covering them and I share your skepticism. But to replace them with just a bunch of like influencer cranks who just make up.

[00:16:25]>> But why is the previous ounce?

[00:16:27]>> Why was the guy who I just laid out here literally who's posting posting and celebrating his gay kink porn while working at the CDC who was in charge of my child's vaccine.

[00:16:36]>> I don't even know who you're talking about.

[00:16:37]>> Oh, I'll send you I'll send you exactly what it is.

[00:16:40]But no, but this is a very You want RFK Jr. over that? You think things are better now than the way they were when you had actual people who were at least professional and trying to follow some sort of scientific guidance.

[00:16:52]>> I would just say that that's professional. It's not professional. The same people who were talking about racism is so horrible. So you're racism is horrible.

[00:16:58]>> Okay. So yeah, go out and protest, but if somebody else wants to protest, that's that's not okay. I mean, >> everybody should have been allowed to protest and there were plenty of protests against the mandates as well.

[00:17:06]>> They said one thing was fine and one thing wasn't. you have to lock down for this, you shouldn't lock down for that.

[00:17:11]Like that was a serious problem if I recall.

[00:17:14]>> I am not denying that soccer is you had some professionals who had some expertise. Now you have either all you have with these people between Doge and the RFK Jr. approach. All you've had is a complete dismantling of the entire public health approach and a replacement with a bunch of cranks who just make up. That's what I'm saying. Based on that, the other people weren't cranks either. That is crank behavior. Saying that, you know, mandating vaccines for a one-year-old is crank behavior.

[00:17:43]Mandating vaccines or lockdowns and school closures and recommending all that vaccines literally save millions of lives.

[00:17:49]>> Hey, but in terms of reducing >> I would much rather have a those vaccines going out to the public and millions of lives saved and going a little too far than saying let it rip and millions of people can just die and it is what it is.

[00:18:02]>> Sins committed in the era or in the direction that we agree with are fine.

[00:18:05]What I'm trying to point out is that I think that what a lot have happened with RFK Jr. and others in uh for dismantling let's say of some organizations and what they have done has not been necessarily good but I will never sit here and defend like the previous public health regime and system. That's all I'm trying to say is you can recognize the disaster and dramatic failures and then also see yes we were supposed to have a revolution in a different direction.

[00:18:28]Ultimately, I don't think it's gone in the correct competence way that it has, but we cannot I just I cannot sit here and ignore the the absolute failures.

[00:18:36]>> No one is ignoring that. But you're saying you prefer it and I don't prefer that at all.

[00:18:39]>> I took something they took something that was bad and they made it vastly worse. And there is no doubt in my mind if we had a pandemic now, it would be way worse. And I just don't think that there's any doubt about that. The response would be worse. These people are incompetent. They're out here like we're looking for some volunteers to go to the airport to screen for Ebola. Good luck with that. We've got, you know, measles outbreaks, diseases from the past coming back and complete obliteration. I mean, the yes, there was damage to public trust that was done under the, you know, previous um approach, but what any is anyone going to appro believe what RFK Jr. has to say about anything when he just makes up insane completely ideological?

[00:19:21]>> Oh, I'm not I I will treat it with the same skepticism that I did under Dr. Anthony Fouchy. That's what that's what I'm trying to say. And I can see very clearly how we will be in that position.

[00:19:30]I will also blame them because they're the people who are in charge if that's where we end up. And this is look, this is why we had to cover this because this is the reality. We're going to have Annie Jacobson on uh soon to talk about her biological war book. And like this is this is probably the number one thing I'm like most worried about now after seeing because look, like I said, Ebola is not the big threat. But I'm like, okay, well, these people are in charge now. As you said, fair fair. It's all fair. We can debate Doge, CDC, and all that other cuts. Many people like me will remember many of the failures of the previous administration, too. And uh basically, anything the government tells me from now on, I'm like, we'll see.

[00:20:05]We'll see. That's basically kind of where I'm at. And I think a lot of liberals now, like yourself, are in that position because of the not a liberal, but anyway. You know what I mean? How dare you offend me that way.

[00:20:16]>> I apologize. A lot of people uh a lot of people who are against the Trump administration as a catch-all, right?

[00:20:22]are now also in a similar position to where some of us were under the Biden administration. I I think that is genuinely like a crisis point for >> again it was the Trump administration where co was most of the co response was. So >> okay sure what so to say that what Biden didn't preside over. I'm just saying there's such an eraser of, you know, what the early decision-m and the way that went down and there's such a like >> there's just such a fabrication of reality around the fact that the COVID response was all under Biden when >> thousand% I mean we yeah we together the masking school lockdowns all that all happened under Trump. It was warp speed was under Trump too. Uh which you know a lot of people also forget.

[00:21:00]>> Yeah. Well war in my opinion warp speed was one of the best things that Trump did.

[00:21:04]>> All right well there you go. All right let's get to Hormuse. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

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