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ebola
Public Health Experts Point to Trump Aid Cuts as WHO Declares Emergency Over Ebola Outbreak in DRC, Uganda
"Before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground," said one public health expert.
May 17, 2026
The World Health Organization's official designation of an Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda as a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday came just a day after the world learned that the disease was spreading at all—a highly unusual chain of events, public health experts said, and one that suggested the virus has been circulating for weeks without the outbreak being detected.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Sunday that eight laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases, and 80 suspected deaths had been reported in at least three health zones across Ituri Province in the DRC. In Kampala, the densely populated capital of neighboring Uganda, two lab-confirmed cases and one death were reported within 24 hours of each other.
The victims in Kampala had no apparent link to one another; both had recently traveled from Congo.
The confirmed cases in Congo include some that have been reported in Kinshasa, the capital. The fact that the disease has been able to spread to two large cities with international airports, and the "clusters of deaths across the province of Ituri" point to "a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported, with significant local and regional risk of spread," said WHO.
"At least four deaths among healthcare workers in a clinical context suggestive of viral haemorrhagic fever have been reported from the affected area, raising concerns regarding healthcare-associated transmission, gaps in infection prevention and control measures, and the potential for amplification within health facilities," the agency said.
Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said the numbers being reported could make the outbreak "one of the 10 biggest Ebola outbreaks in history."
"We're just hearing about this now? That makes no sense. Those numbers take weeks to accumulate," said Jha, adding that the fact that suspected cases have been detected in capital cities as well as Bunia, the provincial capital of Ituri, "matters enormously for spread."
Tedros emphasized that the outbreak is considered "extraordinary" because there is no approved vaccine or therapeutics for Ebola caused by the Bundibugyo virus, as this strain is. WHO sent a team to investigate in Ituri after first being notified of suspected Ebola cases on May 5, but initial samples tested negative, as available field equipment was only able to detect the Zaire strain of the disease.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and global partners "need to surge resources in," Jha said. "A slow response creates unnecessary risks to people everywhere."
WHO, which President Donald Trump withdrew the US from last year, said the public health emergency designation was made to ramp up surveillance and infection prevention in the countries where the outbreak is occurring, enhance preparedness in bordering countries, and spread awareness in the international community.
The Ebola outbreak is the second to hit Uganda since Trump slashed foreign assistance funding, including by dismantling the US Agency for International Development. Earlier this month, CNN reported that the administration plans to divert $2 billion in global health program funding to cover the cost of closing USAID.
US foreign spending dropped by 56.9% after Trump shut down the agency as well as smaller aid programs and pushed Congress to rescind previously approved foreign assistance. USAID played a critical role in responding to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
In March 2025, when an Ebola outbreak was reported in Uganda, US officials warned that Trump's actions on foreign assistance at that point, including the termination of USAID grants, was impeding the Ugandan government's ability to procure lab supplies, diagnostic equipment, and protective gear for medical workers.
Dr. Herbert Luswata, president of the Uganda Medical Association, told The New York Times at the time that the country's ability to respond to Ebola was notably different than it had been during a previous outbreak in 2022, when dozens of medical workers volunteered to help treat patients.
The lack of funds and protective equipment had "left many afraid to help this time," the Times reported.
“With no USAID money and CDC expertise, it was like Uganda was left to die," Luswata told the Times.
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who survived Ebola in 2014, told CBS Saturday that "before the second Trump administration, USAID would have been on the ground" to respond to the current outbreak.
"The CDC would have been on the ground at a moment's notice, maybe even before a moment's notice, of a new outbreak of Ebola because we were in a bunch of countries," said Spencer. "We created relationships beforehand."
Last year, Trump megadonor Elon Musk, who was then leading efforts to slash government spending at the Department of Government Efficiency, said DOGE had "accidentally" canceled US support for Ebola prevention but claimed the funding had been "restored...and there was no interruption.”
But a number of Ebola-related contracts were in fact cut, accounting for $1.6 million out of $2.2 million that had previously gone toward the prevention efforts.
In recent weeks, public health experts have also warned that Trump's cuts to the CDC and other public health programs have left the US ill-prepared to respond to the hantavirus outbreak that originated on a cruise ship.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former leader on USAID's Covid-19 and disaster relief response work, said the current Ebola outbreak is "very worrying" and appeared to be the result of a "massive surveillance failure."
"It is really unusual for an Ebola outbreak to get to this scale before being detected; particularly in DRC, which has a lot of Ebola experience," said Konyndyk.
"I can't help but wonder," said Konyndyk, "if the drawdown of USAID and CDC health interventions by DOGE undermined some of the surveillance and detection initiatives that might have helped to catch this earlier."
WHO emphasized that the current crisis in DRC and Uganda requires "international coordination and cooperation to understand the extent of the outbreak, to coordinate surveillance, prevention, and response efforts, to scale up and strengthen operations and ensure ability to implement control measures."
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As Uganda Reports Ebola Death, Experts Sound Alarm on Trump's Order to Quit WHO
"This is pure stupidity that will only hurt us," warned one U.S. doctor and Ebola expert.
Jan 31, 2025
Public health experts pointed to the announcement of highly contagious hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in at least three central and eastern African nations this week to underscore what they say are the dangers of President Donald Trump's ideologically driven decision to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization during a time of mounting pandemic threats.
Uganda Ministry of Health Permanent Secretary Diana Atwine said Thursday that a 32-year-old nurse died of Sudan Ebola virus the previous day in the capital Kampala amid the first new outbreak in two years. Atwine assured the public "that we are in full control" of the situation.
Uganda's alert followed reports of another potential Ebola outbreak, this one in the Western Democratic Republic of Congo. Additionally, health officials earlier this month announced an outbreak of suspected Marburg Virus Disease—a severe, often fatal illness similar to Ebola—in neighboring Tanzania. At least nine people have reportedly died.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media Thursday that "a full-scale response is being initiated" by the Ugandan government and its international partners. In a statement, the WHO said it is "deploying senior public health experts and mobilizing staff from the country office to support all the key outbreak response measures."
During past outbreaks of Ebola—a severe viral disease spread via contact with infected bodily fluids, with a fatality rate of 50-90%—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked with the WHO to help stem the spread of the illness.
However, following Trump's January 20 executive order initiating a U.S. withdrawal from the WHO over its alleged "mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic," CDC and other public health officials have been ordered to stop working with the United Nations body, effective immediately.
"The agencies that are statutorily responsible for protecting our health are unable to do that job because they are not able to pick up the phone and talk to people who might have information that could protect U.S. health and security," Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health, told Stat this week.
"This is just one of the examples about how the United States loses access, loses the ability to protect American lives," Nuzzo explained. "We can't be everywhere, we can't have eyes and ears on the ground in every possible location [where] harm could be emerging. And this is what happens when we don't engage with institutions that can provide these lifesaving insights."
Experts said other existing or emerging epidemiological threats including bird flu underscore the lifesaving imperative of more, not less, international cooperation.
"Local health officials and doctors depend on the CDC to get disease updates, timely prevention, testing and treatment guidelines, and information about outbreaks," University of Southern California public health expert Dr. Jeffrey Klausner told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
"Shutting down public health communication stops a basic function of public health," he added. "Imagine if the government turned off fire sirens or other warning systems."
Dr. Ashish Jha, the former White House Covid-19 coordinator during the Biden administration, noted Thursday on social media that during Ebola outbreaks, the CDC "usually sends a team right away to help bolster staff that might already be there and support the ministry of health."
"There'd be clear communication from CDC and White House about what exactly is being done, what help we are sending, what American hospitals and others can do to be prepared should Ebola land here," Jha continued. "So what of this is happening? My sense is, not much—but we don't know."
"The communication freeze means CDC not sharing what if anything it is doing," he added. "Travel freeze means CDC staff likely not going. Directive to stop working with WHO means we're flying blind and don't have information about what is happening on the ground. None of this is good."
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The World's Failed Response to Covid-19 in Africa Must End
Africans are paying the price of global abandonment with their lives.
Feb 22, 2022
When the Ebola virus was ravaging West African countries in 2014, health care providers, public health researchers and activists worked feverishly to stamp it out before it spread and turned into the type of life-shattering pandemic we're all too familiar with today.
COVID-19 has revealed the continued global failure to help build a long-promised meaningful, swift-acting, effective, and fair international public health infrastructure to save lives across the African continent.
But the global response to COVID-19 in Africa has been too little, too late. When The New York Times reported in January 2021 that the dead were not being counted in Africa, it failed to mention the living had been abandoned. Africans are paying the price of global abandonment with their lives. The world must improve its response, or future variants of COVID-19 and new viruses and pathogens will surely soon emerge. And we've all seen the impact an unchecked virus can have on the world.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Africans have once again mobilized their societies and communities to avert a health care calamity. Religious and so-called "traditional" leaders, secular grassroots associations, radio stations, and universities have joined the fight against the virus. Across Africa, people know about the veracity of COVID-19 and the effectiveness a vaccine provides in fighting its deadliness. They have been persuaded by local efforts to fight epidemics, which, post-Ebola, have been built into West Africa's health sectors, communities, and surveillance capabilities.
Yet in global politics, African engagement to stop disease spread is neither recognized nor supported. COVID-19 has revealed the continued global failure to help build a long-promised meaningful, swift-acting, effective, and fair international public health infrastructure to save lives across the African continent.
Having been part of the initial efforts to stamp out Ebola, we demand that the international community support African health care systems in reversing the spread of COVID-19 on the continent. These efforts must include dropping the patents of COVID-19 vaccines so that African countries can manufacture the vaccines without fear of legal repercussions.
Global public opinion has accepted the view that mRNA vaccines are too complex and too sophisticated to produce in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This is a ruse. The truth is that corporate patents on mRNA vaccines are one of the greatest barriers to rolling out generic vaccines across Africa. There are 120 manufacturing sites that have the capacity to produce mRNA vaccines on all three continents.
Recently two Texas-based scientists, Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez, have developed Corbevax, a patent-free vaccine that has been approved by the Indian government and will be produced by the Hyderabad-based company Biological E. This new patent-free vaccine has been, quite appropriately, called "a gift for the world" - and it is especially needed in Africa, where only about 11% of the continent's population is fully vaccinated.
Nobody should die for the right of the patent. "Patent protections and other IP restrictions are only the latest means of enforcing and worsening inequalities that date to the slave trade and the colonial period," said Jesse B. Bump, executive director of the Takemi Program in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To this day, rich countries leverage their economic power to extract African rare earth elements, cocoa, diamonds, and other resources under most inhumane circumstances. Patents for COVID-19 vaccinations are another expression of the desire of Western companies and the countries that support them to extract yet more from Africa and make the most money possible.
In addition to Big Pharma dropping the patents, Covax, the UN's facility to finance the distribution of vaccines, must be adequately funded. There is no false choice between these two positions. Essential goods like masks, PPE, therapeutics, and vaccine commodities such as syringes are facing shortages in Africa but not elsewhere.
We call upon the G20 countries to donate $10 billion to COVAX and to the support of the COVID-19 response in Africa. For too long, Africa has had to witness the world tolerate its suffering and cope with austere responses to emergency conditions. The African health care infrastructure is marked by severe austerity--epitomized by the barebones Ebola treatment units set up during the 2014 Ebola crisis-where patients received a minimum of treatment, and the imperative of disease control trumped the obligation of care. This bias, too, has deep roots in colonialism, when containing diseases was indispensable for Europeans to conquer and maintain territory. Global health, as it is currently funded, cannot compensate for the immense needs of "clinical deserts" on the African continent. To illustrate the dearth of funding: the WHO's entire budget is comparable to a large US hospital's.
Having observed the devastations of disease spread and the valiant efforts of locals to respond to them, we demand that the international community invest in African health care systems in reversing the spread of COVID-19 on the continent. Such an investment would not be just an act of morality and fairness. As this pandemic and Ebola have vividly shown, improving African health care is in the self-interest of the entire world. Africans have mobilized all their resources to beat back the spread of the coronavirus--it's time the rest of the world does its part.
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