U.S. Doctor Who Had Ebola Rails Against Elon Musk's White House USAID Claim
The Trump administration had its first official cabinet meeting today. There’s lots of analysis and here’s where Grok AI is useful. I’m just focusing on one moment when Elon Musk - who’s brought his Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” approach to the agencies that work to maximize public health, safety and welfare - mentioned a corrected Ebola mistake.
The assertion and the reality relate powerfully to my post on the ongoing demolition of the “soft infrastructure” that constantly sustains and improves American efforts to keep citizens here (and around the world) healthy and safe.
Here’s what Musk said
And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.
You may recall the impacts of the freeze of U.S. Ebola funding even as an Ebola outbreak was brewing were explored in my conversation with Uganda-based Global Press journalist Nakisanze Segawa.
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A fiercer reaction was posted on X by Craig Spencer, a physician who unknowingly contracted Ebola while treating patients in a Guinea outbreak in 2014 and then tested positive back in New York City. Spencer, whom I interviewed during the COVID pandemic after he wrote a wrenching E.R. diary, is now a professor of practice in public health at Brown University.
Here’s what Spencer posted about Musk:
On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak. Normally the U.S. would've very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response.
But this time, we didn't. Because we couldn't. Because this administration wouldn't let them go right when this outbreak was declared.
And normally the U.S. would've helped set up border screening and other measures on the ground. But this time, we didn't.
Normally, we would've spoke with the WHO about helping end the outbreak. But this time, we didn't. Because CDC staff weren't even allowed to talk to them.
I've been told by a colleague that Uganda tried calling the White House to notify them of the outbreak for 2 days...but no one answered the phone.
Two months ago we had amazing experts working on global health security there. Now there appears to be no one to pick up a phone.
You know who does 'Ebola prevention' here in the U.S.? The CDC.
Hundreds of these frontline experts lost their jobs last week as part of indiscriminate 'cost saving' firings.
More cuts are expected. USAID has long supported Ebola response efforts overseas. Not no more.
So, it's NOT true to say 'one of things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola prevention' and that it was quickly restored...
Because you've hobbled or directly dismantled the response structures needed to end Ebola outbreaks abroad and protect us here in the U.S.
Here’s Spencer’s remarkable 2015 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine on his experience with this disease: Having and Fighting Ebola — Public Health Lessons from a Clinician Turned Patient.
Here’s our conversation on Spencer’s traumatic pandemic experiences and the remarkable experiment in visual journalism that conveyed it to millions of viewers: