Ten days after the World Health Organization declared a fast-spreading outbreak of Ebola in central Africa to be a public health emergency of international concern, responders are struggling to contain the spread of the virus. “We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” said the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during an online meeting of the African Union this week. |
The outbreak started in Ituri province in eastern Congo, but there was a nearly month-long delay between the first known patient dying on April 24 and the WHO declaring an emergency on May 17. That has set local health officials at a severe disadvantage. So far, at least 220 people have died and some 900 cases have been reported, seven of which are in neighboring Uganda. |
Making matters worse, hospitals and quarantine centers in eastern Congo have faced violent attacks by residents seeking to reclaim the bodies of local community members that have died from the disease, evidently unaware of the risk of infection from victims’ remains. In the town of Mongbwalu in Ituri province, the outbreak’s epicenter, a wave of attacks over the weekend led two dozen patients to flee from their quarantine tents. |
“Attacks on health facilities make tracking cases and their contacts nearly impossible,” Ghebreyesus warned. |
As we wrote last week, U.S. President Donald Trump’s aid cuts played a role in the delayed detection, as well as the lack of adequate resources in Congo that has allowed the epidemic to spread. While the U.S. has since announced some steps to assist the response, the absence of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Trump administration’s earlier withdrawal from the WHO are constraining its efforts. |
The White House has signaled that its top priority is not to stop the epidemic where it started but rather to prevent Ebola from reaching U.S. shores. As a result, the administration plans to send U.S. permanent residents and even citizens exposed to Ebola to a makeshift facility in Kenya rather than bringing them home for treatment as it has done in the past. |
Public health experts say that such an approach is shortsighted and counterproductive, not to mention unnecessary. U.S. medical facilities are capable of quarantining citizens who have been exposed to Ebola while bringing them home for treatment. Indeed, that is exactly what happened in past outbreaks: American patients were evacuated and treated at U.S. hospitals. |
That kind of high-quality medical care is particularly important for this particular strain of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo, which has no approved treatment or vaccine. That means a patient’s odds of survival will depend heavily on the kind of environment they are treated in. |
The Trump administration’s approach could also “push people to hide potential exposures, or incentivize individuals or organizations to downplay those exposures,” Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician and Ebola survivor, pointed out in a Substack post. “If you know that any ‘high-risk’ exposure will get you shipped to Kenya instead of sent home, it’s not hard to imagine people not being fully forthcoming about what may have happened to them. That is exactly backwards from how you contain a disease.” |
For the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters, not allowing anyone exposed to Ebola into the United States might seem consistent with an “America First” foreign policy. But it is only demonstrating that it doesn’t care about Americans sickened by the virus—even medical professionals who are risking their lives to help contain a major epidemic. |
Such a display of callousness should perhaps come as no surprise from a man who wrote on Twitter during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” |