\n<\/p>\n
A previously undetected outbreak of Ebola is coursing through parts of central Africa, and the US appears to be doing little to help stop it, after massive cuts to global and domestic public health efforts.<\/p>\n
There is no cure and no vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo variant of Ebola, which has caused two outbreaks in recent decades. Health leaders and scientists are now racing to understand where the virus is spreading and attempting to stop it \u2013 but the US is notably absent in these efforts.<\/p>\n
In the past year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, thousands of staff at US health agencies were laid off, communications stalled and key scientific research canceled.<\/p>\n
There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak \u201cmight have been going on for a few months\u201d, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.<\/p>\n
The outbreak was immediately declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), before even convening the committee that usually makes that determination. Officials say it may last for months.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe DRC is one of the most vulnerable health systems in the world, and was the second-biggest recipient of USAID funding,\u201d said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. The US withdrawal of funding with \u201czero notice\u201d has been \u201cdisruptive to the country\u2019s basic activities\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was pennies compared to what you get in return,\u201d Andersen said of global health investments. It is far cheaper and easier to prevent and contain outbreaks than it is to respond to them, he said. With the US cutting off the first option, the second scenario will become increasingly common.<\/p>\n
The US also announced it would leave the WHO and end $130m in funding, which resulted in 2,371 lost jobs at the organization, Kavanagh said, calling the cuts a \u201cself-inflicted wound that the administration has really brought on us\u201d. This outbreak and response was \u201cdeeply foreseeable when you gut public health surveillance and you gut public health capacity\u201d, Kavanagh added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just that we\u2019re leaving the table, we are completely cutting ourselves out of the conversation,\u201d Andersen said. \u201cWe are upending the table.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CDC has \u201calways been the premier agency\u201d when it comes to country-level leadership and played a key role as a partner \u201cyou could turn to\u201d, Andersen said.<\/p>\n
But under the second Trump administration, Ebola response teams were suspended, and health centers and medical supplies \u2013 particularly crucial with a virus spread through touch, with supportive care the only treatment \u2013 were dramatically cut back.<\/p>\n
A world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was designed for exactly this scenario. The lab would normally be swinging into action, following up on research indicating monoclonal antibodies and a vaccine might be effective against this strain, possibly testing those treatments and vaccines, performing in-depth sequencing work on the samples shared during the outbreak.<\/p>\n
But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly and their work \u2013 key for preventing and responding to outbreaks \u2013 ended with no notice. The website for the lab is still closed, indicating it has not been revived during this outbreak.<\/p>\n
Satish Pillai, an incident manager for the CDC\u2019s Ebola response, said he \u201ccan\u2019t speak\u201d to the NIH lab when the Guardian asked about it in a press conference on Monday. Instead, Pillai said that the US is able to test for Ebola through its laboratory network, a comment unrelated to the Guardian\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n
Because of layoffs, terminations and high-profile departures, key confirmed positions at US health agencies are vacant. Currently, the CDC has no director; there\u2019s no US surgeon general; there\u2019s no commissioner at the FDA.<\/p>\n
Officials say there are now between 25 and 30 staff in the DRC country office. The CDC is sending one more person, Pillai said, and other experts are available remotely.<\/p>\n
The DRC office suffered massive and sudden cuts when USAID was unexpectedly dissolved last year. Former employees sued the US government after they were abandoned and lost everything, with no jobs or options to evacuate from DRC, they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen those USAID stop-work orders came out, there was a whole series of people who were actively looking for spillover in the DRC and in Uganda,\u201d Kavanagh said. \u201cThere were hundreds of health workers doing surveillance activities, and then, of course, you had the bigger picture, which is the thousands of health workers who were doing HIV, TB, malaria, maternal and child health \u2013 all of these things funded through US funding from USAID and also some from CDC to be doing global health activities \u2013 who were the frontlines of detection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patients don\u2019t usually come to the clinic suspecting they have Ebola, he pointed out; they usually come in with a fever or other symptoms, and \u201cthose frontline community health workers \u2026 are always the ones that detect outbreaks early\u201d.<\/p>\n
That work ended abruptly and is now being replaced with country-by-country agreements, some of which appear to be predicated on resource-sharing agreements. The US government is \u201cessentially holding hostage\u201d the countries that have built health systems around US guidance, \u201cand then from one day to the next you just cut it\u201d, Andersen said.<\/p>\n
In the past, the US had ensured that \u201cmany, many potential global outbreaks didn\u2019t become global\u201d, but now it\u2019s stepping back, Kavanagh said, adding: \u201cThis outbreak should have been detected weeks ago, and exactly how and why will be figured out as we go, but it certainly says that the United States has stopped playing the role.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, the US is announcing travel bans for noncitizens who have recently traveled to the region, which is \u201cpublic health theater\u201d that essentially punishes the countries and doesn\u2019t actually stop cases, Kavanagh said. The Africa CDC called for countries to refrain from \u201cfear-driven\u201d travel bans. \u201cThe fastest path to protecting all countries in the world is to aggressively support outbreak control at the source,\u201d Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point, this is an out-of-control epidemic that has now crossed borders, and this is really bad for the region, and will result in lots more deaths, and could be a real crisis,\u201d Kavanagh said. Health leaders in the DRC are among the smartest, most experienced Ebola responders \u2013 but now they\u2019re confronting an outbreak \u201cwith hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the global capacity to help them respond\u201d.<\/p>\n
Andersen noted \u201cthese countries are way more competent than we are in responding to something like Ebola\u201d and that African scientists have done \u201cremarkable\u201d work already sequencing the virus, which demonstrates a new spillover event and could offer clues to where the outbreak originated.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that doesn\u2019t mean that we should just completely cut ourselves out of the picture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Outbreaks like these have economic, geopolitical and global stability implications, Kavanagh said. But they also matter because allowing anyone to die \u201cneedlessly of a disease that can be stopped is immoral, and we are living in a world where we don\u2019t have to allow infectious diseases to spread unchecked\u201d, he said. \u201cEbola can be stopped, and if we don\u2019t mobilize the dollars and the public health efforts, then we are simply choosing not to stop the outbreak. Because it can be stopped. The question is, will it be? And when?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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