Speaker 1: How funding cuts left the world vulnerable to Ebola, A
Speaker 1: strain with no known treatment or vaccine, is spreading fast,
Speaker 1: and the international system built to contain outbreaks is in crisis.
Speaker 1: By Jason Gale and Jessica Nix, read aloud by Mark Liedorf.
Speaker 1: As the burial workers in masks, gloves and blue surgical
Speaker 1: gowns pull a coffin from the back of a vehicle,
Speaker 1: the mourners press in closer, yelling and gesturing. The crowd
Speaker 1: buffets and shoves the men. Open it so we can
Speaker 1: see him, Open it, so we can see him. They
Speaker 1: shout your thieves onlookers cry you've killed someone. With the
Speaker 1: pressure escalating, the team sets the coffin on the ground
Speaker 1: and steps back, allowing the lid to be opened. An
Speaker 1: ebola patient's viral load often peaks around the time of death,
Speaker 1: when infectious bodily fluids can almost coat the body, making
Speaker 1: touching a corpse especially dangerous. So these chaotic moments captured
Speaker 1: in a shaky self video from the town of Kondo
Speaker 1: in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, risk becoming yet
Speaker 1: another axis of transmission in the growing outbreak. The confrontation
Speaker 1: isn't an isolated event. Treatment tents and isolation wards have
Speaker 1: been set on fire, and tensions at one burial became
Speaker 1: so volatile that police fired warning shots into the air
Speaker 1: to disperse the crowd. In early June, it was reported
Speaker 1: that a team conducting another burial had been attacked, forcing
Speaker 1: workers to abandon the coffin. This violence, stemming from mistrust
Speaker 1: of authorities, is hampering efforts to contain a particularly dire
Speaker 1: outbreak of ebola, whose pathology it can overwhelm the body
Speaker 1: with fever, vomiting, diarrhea, internal bleeding, and organ failure has
Speaker 1: made it one of the world's most feared diseases. As
Speaker 1: of June second, more than four hundred and seventy suspected
Speaker 1: or confirmed cases and at least sixty one deaths had
Speaker 1: been reported across a swath of Congo and Uganda, stretching
Speaker 1: about as far as the distance from New York to Cleveland.
Speaker 1: This outbreak has the most momentum upon discovery of any
Speaker 1: Ebola outbreak in history, says Jeremy Konnandike, a former senior
Speaker 1: official with the US Agency for International Development who oversaw
Speaker 1: the American response to the twenty fourteen to sixteen West
Speaker 1: African Ibola epidemic. It's going to be exceptionally difficult to contain.
Speaker 1: The world spent a decade overhauling ebola preparedness after the
Speaker 1: West African epidemic, which was by far the deadliest on record.
Speaker 1: Even with a steady commitment to those reforms, though the
Speaker 1: current outbreak would have been hard to stop. Much of
Speaker 1: the world's planning focused on the more common zayere strain,
Speaker 1: leading to vaccines, antibody treatments, and rapid tests that have
Speaker 1: successfully disrupted several outbreaks, But the rare bundibujio strain behind
Speaker 1: the current epidemic has no approved vaccine or treatment, and
Speaker 1: widely used diagnostic tools initially failed.
Speaker 2: To detect it.
Speaker 1: The virus also surfaced in one of the hardest places
Speaker 1: in the world to stop an outbreak, a warscuarred region
Speaker 1: where years of conflict have displaced more than five million people,
Speaker 1: hollowed out health systems, and freight trust between communities and
Speaker 1: the government. Former US officials say the challenges were exacerbated
Speaker 1: by a foreign aid freeze announced by the Trump administration
Speaker 1: and the decimation of American backed health programs under Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's Department of government efficiency, which included the dismantling of
Speaker 1: USAID and the cancelation of almost eighty five percent of
Speaker 1: its programs. Prior to that, in Eastern Congo, the agency
Speaker 1: funded health groups, community surveillance, specimen transport, and monitoring of
Speaker 1: potential disease transmission from animals to humans. Other g seven
Speaker 1: countries also cut AID last year, including Germany, France, Japan,
Speaker 1: and the UK, but none did so nearly as deeply
Speaker 1: as the US, whose annual global development assistance dropped by
Speaker 1: fifty seven percent, according to figures from the Organization for
Speaker 1: Economic Cooperation and Development. One flagship US program that supported
Speaker 1: related capacity across Africa, the two hundred and forty five
Speaker 1: million dollars STRO Initiative, was repeatedly halted and restarted, throwing
Speaker 1: contracts and payment systems into turmoil and prompting a major
Speaker 1: partner to lay off staff. According to a former senior
Speaker 1: USAID official who oversaw outbreak preparedness before leaving last year,
Speaker 1: US assistance to Congo has also fallen sharply since last year,
Speaker 1: including steep reductions in humanitarian and health programs tied to
Speaker 1: outbreak preparedness and response CONANDIKE says USAID's former footprinting Congo
Speaker 1: gave American officials a much clearer picture of what was
Speaker 1: happening on the ground, especially in the conflict hit East,
Speaker 1: where humanitarian funding was concentrated. Much of that eyes and
Speaker 1: Ears capability disappeared after missions were closed and staff and
Speaker 1: funding were cut.
Speaker 2: When I was at.
Speaker 1: USAID, if my team had come to me and said
Speaker 1: some of our NGO partners are seeing clusters of unexplained
Speaker 1: viral hemorrhagic fever in eastern Congo, that would be a
Speaker 1: hair on fire type of moment. Conandike says, how many
Speaker 1: of those programs are gone and there's no one on
Speaker 1: the other end of the line in the US government.
Speaker 1: Internal tensions over the cuts spilled into public view early on.
Speaker 1: In congressional testimony last March, Nicholas Enrich, USAID's former Acting
Speaker 1: Assistant Administrator for Global Health, said that after an abola
Speaker 1: outbreak was reported in Uganda in January twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: bureaucratic bottlenecks tied to the Trump administration's foreign aid freeze
Speaker 1: slowed the response.
Speaker 2: The outbreak was declared over that April.
Speaker 1: Enrich also testified that political appointees had instructed staff to
Speaker 1: give lower priority to ebola response work even after some
Speaker 1: programs resumed. The State Department disputed his account, telling Wired
Speaker 1: magazine that Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally reviewed and
Speaker 1: approved USAID decisions and that Enrich was spreading leaks and lies.
Speaker 1: Other parts of the global disease response system were scaled
Speaker 1: back after the US began withdrawing from the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization in early twenty twenty five. Those cuts included a
Speaker 1: thirty five million dollar award supporting WHO emergency surveillance, laboratory
Speaker 1: networks and outbreak coordination. Funding was also cut for a
Speaker 1: WHO managed global network of more than seven hundred laboratories
Speaker 1: that track pathogens including ibola, denge, and measles. The organization
Speaker 1: has struggled to deal with the collapse of support from
Speaker 1: what had long been its largest donor. With other governments
Speaker 1: not stepping in to fully replace the lost funding, the
Speaker 1: WHO has frozen hiring, laid off staff, and sharply reduced
Speaker 1: spending across emergency operations. Former US officials and on the
Speaker 1: ground partners say the result of these and other cuts
Speaker 1: has been a thinner, slower, and more fragmented international response
Speaker 1: system just as another major Ebola crisis unfolds, The Trump
Speaker 1: administration disputes claims that its policies have weakened outbreak detection,
Speaker 1: and Department of State officials have stressed that an epidemic
Speaker 1: emerging in a remote conflict zone would have been difficult
Speaker 1: to identify under any circmace stances. White House spokesman Cushed
Speaker 1: de Si said in a statement that within twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: Of being notified of the outbreak, the.
Speaker 1: Administration mobilized a swift and robust response, convening top medical experts,
Speaker 1: deploying aid and materiel, increasing screening and testing procedures, airlifting
Speaker 1: American citizens out of the DRC, and implementing travel restrictions.
Speaker 1: Desi added that the US continues to act faster and
Speaker 1: more comprehensively than any other country to contain the transmission
Speaker 1: of Ebola. Timothy Pigott, a spokesman for the State Department,
Speaker 1: says it is false to claim that the USAID reform
Speaker 1: has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ibola. The
Speaker 1: State Department added in a statement that the realignment of
Speaker 1: USAID did not have any significant effect on funding levels
Speaker 1: for health and health security programs in the eastern part
Speaker 1: of Congo, and that the US has recently mobilized more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and ten million dollars in assistance to
Speaker 1: the country, where it continues to be the largest bilateral donor.
Speaker 1: The Department added that STRIDES and similar programs are now
Speaker 1: overseen by its Bureau of Global Health, Security and Diplomacy,
Speaker 1: a structure that provides more efficient and effective coordination. An
Speaker 1: internal WHO briefing note circulated in mid May and viewed
Speaker 1: by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, warned that aid cuts and conflict were
Speaker 1: pushing parts of Eastern Congo's health system toward collapse. More
Speaker 1: than half of health facilities in some areas had closed
Speaker 1: or been damaged, the note said, and as many as
Speaker 1: eighty five percent of those that remained were facing critical
Speaker 1: drug and staff shortages, with almost forty percent of health
Speaker 1: workers estimated to have left their posts. We're playing catch up,
Speaker 1: says Karen Donnelly, Senior Vice president for Crisis Response, Recovery
Speaker 1: and Development at the International Rescue Committee, which operates health
Speaker 1: sites in Congo. Every delay in tackling any contagious outbreak,
Speaker 1: and especially ebola, can be fatal.
Speaker 2: The IRC, whose.
Speaker 1: Budget relies broadly on the US and other donors, has
Speaker 1: scaled back sixty percent of its Congolese health sites. In
Speaker 1: boom Na, the outbreak's epicenter. Only two of its five
Speaker 1: primary care sites remain in the ten days after the
Speaker 1: outbreak was declared, pharmacies in Bunya ran out of hand sanitizer,
Speaker 1: and local health officials reported shortages of protective equipment. The
Speaker 1: city's laboratory was processing only a trickle of ebola tests
Speaker 1: and briefly suspended operations after running out of fuel for
Speaker 1: a generator. AID workers told The New York Times. As
Speaker 1: for burials, Red Cross teams have people trained to carry
Speaker 1: them out in a safe and dignified manner, but lack
Speaker 1: the money to pay for the work, says Joanne lu,
Speaker 1: a public health professor at McGill University who helped lead
Speaker 1: the response of Medicine Sants Frontier to the West African epidemic.
Speaker 1: The result of all this is a dangerous convergence of crises,
Speaker 1: Ibola spreading through one of the hardest places in the
Speaker 1: world to contain it at a moment when the international
Speaker 1: surveillance and response systems built after past epidemics are significantly weakened.
Speaker 1: I suspect The numbers we have are only a fraction
Speaker 1: of the actual toll, and the limit heated testing and
Speaker 1: contact tracing suggest it will be early to mid June
Speaker 1: before we have a realistic understanding of what's happening on
Speaker 1: the ground, says Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who
Speaker 1: became New York City's first Ebola patient after treating cases
Speaker 1: in West Africa in twenty fourteen. What we're seeing now
Speaker 1: is really the worst case scenario. Ibola is among the
Speaker 1: world's deadliest infectious diseases, with mortality rates ranging from roughly
Speaker 1: twenty five percent to ninety percent, depending on the strain
Speaker 1: and access to care. The consensus among scientists is that
Speaker 1: bats are the natural reservoir for the virus, and that
Speaker 1: it occasionally jumps into humans through contact with them, for example,
Speaker 1: in saliva or droppings that contaminate fruit, or via other
Speaker 1: infected animals, including primates hunted.
Speaker 2: For bush meat.
Speaker 1: Since the virus was first identified in nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: near the Ebola River in what is now Congo, there
Speaker 1: have been periodic outbreaks, usually in remote rural communities. Once
Speaker 1: in humans, it can read with terrifying efficiency, even tiny
Speaker 1: Amounts of infected fluid entering the body through cuts, scratches,
Speaker 1: or the eyes can be enough to trigger an infection
Speaker 1: as patients become desperately ill. Millions of virus particles can
Speaker 1: concentrate in a single drop of blood, and they can
Speaker 1: also permeate vomit, diarrhea, and sweat, thereby turning basic acts
Speaker 1: of caregiving or burial preparation into dangerous work, especially in
Speaker 1: places with little running water or sanitation. The twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: to sixteen outbreak infected more than twenty eight thousand people
Speaker 1: and killed more than eleven thousand across Guinea, Liberia, and
Speaker 1: Sierra Leone. Infected people also carried the virus to Lagos, London, Madrid,
Speaker 1: New York, and other major cities. The first signs of
Speaker 1: the latest outbreak surfaced as rumors residents in the remote
Speaker 1: mining town of Mongdwalu started posting in early May about
Speaker 1: unusual deaths spreading through the community. Soon, health workers in
Speaker 1: nearby clinics were seeing clusters of patients with fevers, vomiting,
Speaker 1: and profound weakness, symptoms that resemble those of malaria, typhoid,
Speaker 1: and gastro intestinal infections. Initial field tests for the Zayre
Speaker 1: strain came back negative. Blood samples then traveled more than
Speaker 1: one thousand miles through conflict zones to the National Institute
Speaker 1: of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa. The Institute's director General, Jean
Speaker 1: Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, who helped discover Ibola fifty years ago,
Speaker 1: told reporters the samples arrived in poor cold chain conditions
Speaker 1: with temperatures improperly controlled. Preliminary tests on viable samples showed
Speaker 1: the virus in about a dozen African health authorities set
Speaker 1: on May fifteenth. The Bundi Boujo strain was confirmed later
Speaker 1: that day. It now appears the disease had been circulating
Speaker 1: undetected for many weeks. Three Congolese Red Cross volunteers who'd
Speaker 1: handled bodies during a humanitarian mission in late March died
Speaker 1: from ibola last month, pushing back the timeline.
Speaker 2: Of the outbreak.
Speaker 1: Historically, multiple use US funded health partners in eastern Congo
Speaker 1: would likely have been in constant communication with American officials
Speaker 1: as soon as unexplained hemorrhagic fever cases began appearing. Connandike
Speaker 1: says now the formal architecture, but also the informal network
Speaker 1: of relationships, the people you call if you see an
Speaker 1: oh shit kind of problem, it's all gone. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back with how funding cuts left the world vulnerable
Speaker 1: to Ebola. Welcome back to How funding cuts left the
Speaker 1: world vulnerable to Ebola. Standing in front of reporters before
Speaker 1: boarding his plane on the windswept tarmac at Florida's Homestead
Speaker 1: Air Reserve Base on May twenty first, Marco Rubio was
Speaker 1: clear about the US government's top priority in the crisis.
Speaker 1: We care about Ebola. We don't want anyone dying or
Speaker 1: being affected by ebola, he said, But our number one
Speaker 1: priority will always be making sure it doesn't come to
Speaker 1: the United States. That's our number one obligation. One American
Speaker 1: known to have contracted ebola in Congo, a missionary doctor
Speaker 1: believed to have been infected while performing emergency surgery on
Speaker 1: a patient with severe abdominal pain, was evacuated to Germany
Speaker 1: for treatment. Travelers arriving from ebola affected countries are being
Speaker 1: routed through enhanced screening at four US airports, while Green
Speaker 1: card holders who recently traveled through Congo, South Sudan or
Speaker 1: Uganda can be temporarily barred from re entering the country.
Speaker 1: The US has also moved to establish a quarantine facility
Speaker 1: in Kenya for exposed Americans, though the High Court there
Speaker 1: has temporarily barred the site from opening. The State Department
Speaker 1: says its working with Kenyan authorities and is optimistic objections
Speaker 1: will be resolved. An existing network of thirteen containment sites
Speaker 1: was built in the US after the twenty fourteen outbreak,
Speaker 1: but it hasn't been tapped to coordinate response efforts. The
Speaker 1: State Department says it activated disaster response teams on May nineteenth,
Speaker 1: four days after the outbreak was announced by the WHO.
Speaker 1: The more than one hundred and sixty million dollars in
Speaker 1: Ibola related assistance the Department has announced includes funding for
Speaker 1: fifty treatment clinics in Congo and Uganda, though questions remained
Speaker 1: about how this measure will be implemented. The day after
Speaker 1: Rubio made the clinic announcement, the Ugandan Health Ministry said
Speaker 1: it hadn't heard from the US about establishing such facilities.
Speaker 1: The State Department says it will be coordinating with governments
Speaker 1: and frontline responders about the clinics. Former officials note that
Speaker 1: prior to the State Department taking over USAID missions and
Speaker 1: related field infrastructure were well positioned to coordinate with health
Speaker 1: ministries and other parties. Konnandike, who oversaw the construction of
Speaker 1: treatment units during the West African epidemic, says, the last
Speaker 1: thing we would have ever wanted to do is catch
Speaker 1: them off guard with an announcement. We hadn't discussed with
Speaker 1: them first and didn't have their buy in on Ibola.
Speaker 1: Facilities require specialized infection control systems, staff supply chains, and
Speaker 1: community engagement strategies to function swiftly and safely. Proper in
Speaker 1: infrastructure and communication allow responders to rapidly identify, isolate, and
Speaker 1: treat infected people, while contact tracers work to identify, monitor
Speaker 1: and quarantine everyone who is exposed to them until the
Speaker 1: incubation period between two and twenty one days for Ebola
Speaker 1: has passed. All this depends heavily on trust and cooperation.
Speaker 1: Community members must allow contact tracers into their homes and
Speaker 1: agree to isolate, to report symptoms early, and to modify
Speaker 1: burial practices. Right now, in Congo, misinformation is running rampant,
Speaker 1: and almost every day brings another alarming example of how
Speaker 1: trust has broken down, whether its patients fleeing treatment facilities
Speaker 1: or crowds attacking hospitals demanding.
Speaker 2: The release of bodies for burial.
Speaker 1: As many as one in three people in Ituri, the
Speaker 1: province with by far the most cases, believe the virus
Speaker 1: isn't real, according to Action Aid International, a charity group
Speaker 1: that's been conducting information sessions to address these misperceptions. Lou
Speaker 1: and the McGill professor, who worked in West Africa during
Speaker 1: the twenty fourteen apademic says international responders often underestimated how
Speaker 1: terrifying ebola treatment centers appeared to frightened communities. The outreach
Speaker 1: could come across like, Hey, guys, come to die in
Speaker 1: my Ebola center on your own, with people wearing spacesuits,
Speaker 1: and I have no treatment for you, and I have
Speaker 1: no vaccine. She says, there's nothing attractive about that. Grace
Speaker 1: Wairima and Dungu, Senior Manager for Africa Communications and Media
Speaker 1: at Mercy Corps, another of the frontline aid groups operating
Speaker 1: in Congo, says the withdrawal of funding by the US
Speaker 1: and other major donors has led communities to be newly
Speaker 1: suspicious of agencies that re emerged only after Ibola arrived.
Speaker 1: Her organization warned at the time of the pullback that
Speaker 1: the consequences could be far reaching. What we feared most
Speaker 1: has finally come now to be in Dungu says the
Speaker 1: cuts left so many health facilities and health workers out
Speaker 1: of work, and the health facilities without adequateses support and
Speaker 1: the surveillance capacity. Caitlin Brady, Congo, director for the Danish
Speaker 1: Refugee Council, says that although many European governments slashed funding two,
Speaker 1: we're so much weaker without the US. The breakdown of
Speaker 1: trust now harming Ibola response efforts in eastern Congo has
Speaker 1: roots and implications that extend far beyond Central Africa. During
Speaker 1: the COVID nineteen pandemic, public health agencies accumulated enormous powers
Speaker 1: over daily life lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, border restrictions,
Speaker 1: and quarantine rules that reshaped politics across much of the world.
Speaker 1: Many officials argue those tools saved lives, they also triggered
Speaker 1: a backlash that fundamentally altered the political environment surrounding infectious
Speaker 1: disease and contributed to the push to cut aid. Few
Speaker 1: figures have embodied that backlash more than Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
Speaker 1: who built a national following attacking vaccine mandates, pharmaceutical companies,
Speaker 1: and what he described as collusion between public health authorities
Speaker 1: and government regulators. Now, as Health Secretary, Kennedy is overseeing
Speaker 1: responses to simultaneous outbreaks of measles, hantavirus, and ibola, trying
Speaker 1: to reassure supporters that the government will avoid the sweeping
Speaker 1: measures associated with the COVID pandemic, even as officials imposed
Speaker 1: targeted screening, quarantine, and travel restrictions in response to ebola.
Speaker 1: At the headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control and
Speaker 1: Prevention in Atlanta, more than one hundred employees have been
Speaker 1: moved from their day jobs onto the emergency response team.
Speaker 1: According to three people familiar with the agency's actions, who
Speaker 1: requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak on its behalf,
Speaker 1: the team is juggling both the hunt of virus and
Speaker 1: ibola outbreaks, starting early in the morning and working late
Speaker 1: into the night. The agency's emergency operations center, always staffed
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven, has grown increasingly crowded and loud.
Speaker 1: People are fielding calls from CDC country offices in Uganda
Speaker 1: and Congo, helping coordinate sampling and lab tests with roughly
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty employees on the ground. They're also
Speaker 1: working with outside partners, coordinating travel and answering questions from
Speaker 1: congressional offices. The Department of Health and Human Services is
Speaker 1: briefing the White House daily on the Ebola response. Two
Speaker 1: of the people say the challenges have been compounded by
Speaker 1: leadership upheaval and staffing losses at the CDC. Former officials
Speaker 1: say at least a quarter of the agency's employees have
Speaker 1: left over the past year via layoffs, buyouts, or resignations,
Speaker 1: while several senior positions remain filled by acting officials. The
Speaker 1: departures have included both senior outbreak leaders and younger staff,
Speaker 1: says Daniel Jernigan, a thirty one year CDC veteran who
Speaker 1: directed the National Center for Emerging in Zoonotic Infectious Diseases
Speaker 1: from April twenty twenty three to August twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: You have removed the generals and you've removed the troops
Speaker 1: at the beginning of that.
Speaker 2: Career pipeline, he says.
Speaker 1: Former CDC officials say outbreak messaging is increasingly being routed
Speaker 1: through political appointees with limited public health experience, The officials
Speaker 1: count more than twenty such appointees, a record as far
Speaker 1: as they know, with no career staff scientist remaining in
Speaker 1: the director's office. Deb Horri, chief medical Officer and Deputy
Speaker 1: director for program in Science from December twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: to August twenty twenty five, points to a May tenth
Speaker 1: social media post from HHS as an example of questionable communications.
Speaker 1: The post described an American evacuated from a hunt of
Speaker 1: virus stricken cruise ship as having tested mildly PCR positive
Speaker 1: for Andy's virus. What are you a little bit pregnant?
Speaker 1: Horri asks, that wouldn't come from our staff. She notes
Speaker 1: that recent CDC appointees have backgrounds far removed from infectious
Speaker 1: disease response, including in urology, aviation, law, and real estate.
Speaker 1: Asked about the CDC's response to the Abola outbreak, HHS
Speaker 1: spokesperson Andrew Nixon sent a statement that highlight the mobilization
Speaker 1: of personnel and resources, and also said when dangerous outbreaks emerge,
Speaker 1: ministries of health and public health agencies around the world
Speaker 1: continue to turn to CDC for trusted technical expertise, rapid
Speaker 1: operational support, and public health leadership. The United States remains
Speaker 1: deeply engaged in outbreak detection, containment, surveillance, clinical response, and
Speaker 1: global health security, supported by emergency funding from the US,
Speaker 1: the World Bank, African governments, and international donors. A sprawling
Speaker 1: patchwork of CDC and local health workers, WHO officials, Red
Speaker 1: Cross burial crews, and aid organizations is relying on surveillance, treatment,
Speaker 1: and outreach efforts that are less structured than what existed before.
Speaker 1: Red Cross volunteers met with six hundred and forty five
Speaker 1: families on their first day, going door to door to
Speaker 1: explain how ibola spreads and discourage unsafe burial practices. But
Speaker 1: less than a week after the outbreak was declared, health
Speaker 1: workers were already struggling to follow up with more than
Speaker 1: sixty ten ten hundred identified contacts across the epicenter, reaching
Speaker 1: barely one in five each day as the virus spread
Speaker 1: faster than responders could track it. Everyone knows the struggle
Speaker 1: is steeply uphill. The chains of transmission aren't even connected
Speaker 1: to each other, always a bad sign, Lou says, Now
Speaker 1: I have this same doom feeling. There's little hope for
Speaker 1: a vaccine in the near term, despite the scientific advances
Speaker 1: that emerged during the COVID pandemic. Instead, the Trump administration
Speaker 1: has dismantled or defunded several US programs focused on emerging pathogens,
Speaker 1: including one network designed to identify dangerous viruses before they
Speaker 1: infect humans and potentially to develop vaccines that was scrapped
Speaker 1: last June after being deemed unsafe for Americans and not
Speaker 1: a good use of taxpayer funding, according to a stop
Speaker 1: work order one center received. The administration has also closed
Speaker 1: key divisions at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
Speaker 1: including one that helped COREP coordinate global outbreak research and
Speaker 1: response efforts. For some former health officials, ebola itself isn't
Speaker 1: the only story. It's also what it portends. We have
Speaker 1: lost so much ground, says Jean Marazzo, a physician who
Speaker 1: succeeded Anthony Fauci as head of the National Institute of
Speaker 1: Allergy and Infectious Diseases in twenty twenty three. Marazzo was
Speaker 1: placed on administrative leave last year and later dismissed after
Speaker 1: publicly criticizing changes to infectious disease policy and research priorities.
Speaker 1: A measle's epidemic that's infected more than forty two hundred
Speaker 1: Americans since January twenty twenty five. Was already a warning
Speaker 1: sign before hantavirus and ebola came along. Now, Marozzo says,
Speaker 1: you've got these acute crises on top that are really
Speaker 1: pulling the wool away from people's eyes about how bad
Speaker 1: this is going to be, with Ashley Furlong, Michael Kavanaugh,
Speaker 1: David Gura, Michelle Langer, Janis Q, and Jade Katib