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A leading US public health expert who served in former President Joe Biden’s administration is warning that the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda could surpass the 2014 crisis to become the worst on record.
“This is on track to potentially be as bad as the [2014] West African Ebola outbreak if not worse,” Stephanie Psaki, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and former US coordinator for global health security at the National Security Council, told Semafor. “We are on our back foot already, much more than the world was in the beginning of that outbreak.”
The International Rescue Committee has similarly warned the outbreak “could become the deadliest on record without urgent international action.” There are currently over 900 suspected cases and at least 223 deaths. The 2014 West African outbreak lasted more than two years, resulting in more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.
Psaki attributed the current crisis partly to the loss of on-the-ground presence of US-backed aid programs. “I think so far it’s really a failure of detection,” she said. “You don’t have USAID on the ground, you don’t have existing contracts with partners that are working all over DRC, and you don’t have the same US government staff who you can quickly dispatch to help with the containment.”
A State Department spokesperson defended the Trump administration’s response, saying that moving global health security programs from under USAID to State has let to “more efficient and effective coordination.”
“The State Department has responded faster to this Ebola outbreak than USAID did in responses to similar previous outbreaks in 2014 and 2018,” the spokesperson said.
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The CDC has issued an “urgent request” to its workforce to recruit personnel to screen passengers for Ebola at US airports. American travelers entering the US from the DRC, South Sudan, and Uganda will be funneled through special screening at three airports — a measure Psaki endorsed as sensible policy, noting that it was previously done by prior administrations.
She was more skeptical of the administration’s invocation of Title 42, calling it largely ineffective since most travelers from the region are US passport holders and thus exempt.
At a Cabinet meeting convened by President Donald Trump on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “we cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States.”
Psaki’s deeper concern extends beyond this outbreak. “This is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak in the DRC — if there’s ever anything we should be prepared for and able to detect quickly, this is in that category,” she said. “The failure to [detect this outbreak] makes me very worried about our preparedness to detect a new threat, like a novel strain of influenza that could cause a pandemic or the next COVID pandemic.”