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ELON MUSK: One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola - Ebola prevention. I think we will want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
That's Elon Musk, speaking Wednesday at President Trump's first cabinet meeting. It's a comment that caught the ear of Jeremy Konyndyk, who led America's response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 as director of USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. Jeremy Konyndyk joins us now. Good morning.
JEREMY KONYNDYK: Good morning.
RASCOE: So you called that claim from Musk bunk. How so?
KONYNDYK: Well, almost everything he said there is wrong, apart from the fact that they had canceled the team. So there had been a team of about 60 people at USAID that worked on outbreak response. About 10 of them were focused specifically on Ebola specialization. That team of 60 people is now down to six. The team of 10 that worked on Ebola is now down to one remaining person.
Also, while he was saying that, the State Department was drawing up preparations to cancel most of the programs that had been funded to respond to the current Ebola outbreak in Uganda. So at least four of the five awards that USAID had made to support that response effort were canceled by Friday of last week.
RASCOE: There were 11 Ebola cases in the U.S. in 2014. Seven of those were people medically evacuated from abroad. Four were domestic laboratory-confirmed cases. Give us an idea of how big the effort to keep Ebola at bay was and how much of that was shouldered by the U.S.
KONYNDYK: It was a huge effort ultimately because during the critical early phase of the outbreak, not enough was done - not by the U.S. and not by the World Health Organization in that period or the countries involved - to keep it under control when the case numbers were small. And so it got out of hand. It reached urban areas, and it began spreading in urban capitals in West Africa and really just exploded.
That then became a much, much larger problem, requiring the deployment of the U.S. military, requiring a large deployment of a disaster assistance response team - that's the team that I oversaw - a major CDC deployment. And that - you know, that ended up costing huge - you know, billions of dollars in U.S. funding. It also killed 11,000 people, infected 28,000 people in West Africa.
There's a real cost when one of these things gets out of hand. And the risk when you, you know, do a sort of weak response, as the U.S. is doing right now - and really barely a response - is you - you know, that you risk that kind of explosion again.
RASCOE: Well, talk to me, because more than 50 people have died in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo of something that's not Ebola or Marburg but is similarly hemorrhagic, meaning that it causes excessive sickness and blood loss and leads very quickly to death, often just 48 hours after onset. So what are you watching in this outbreak in the DRC?
KONYNDYK: Well, the key thing you want to understand with any new - what's called a novel outbreak, meaning something that's unfamiliar that maybe you haven't seen before - is how is it spreading? How is it being transmitted? Because if it's transmitting human to human, that's very - you know, that can be very difficult to stop.
What it - what seems to be the case now, per the latest from WHO just yesterday, is that this - they think this may have been an infected water source creating this outbreak. In that case, you purify the water source and things should stop. So let's cross our fingers and hope that that's confirmed and that that's manageable.
But what it really underscores is all over the world at any given time, there are lots of mysterious outbreaks, and it's really important to have WHO and the CDC on top of those in terms of the surveillance, to have USAID outbreak teams ready to respond and support the country and humanitarian partners in responding.
RASCOE: Well, can you talk to - well, explain to me how USAID working in another country affects U.S., because some people...
KONYNDYK: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...Listening and their argument may be, well, we're spending all this money in the U.S. The U.S. doesn't have it, and we can't help these other countries. We need to focus on the U.S. So what do you say to that?
KONYNDYK: So diseases don't need passports in order to travel. That's the bottom line. One of the things we invested in hugely in 2014 was traveler screening to prevent cases from reaching the United States after a few cases did reach the United States. Well, traveler screening is one of the things that was just cut by Elon Musk and the State Department. There had been traveler screening happening in Uganda to prevent export of cases. That has now been stopped.
RASCOE: So the idea is that it could cross the borders and get here.
KONYNDYK: Yes.
RASCOE: And then, I mean, how exposed would the U.S. be if the U.S. faced a similar situation to what happened or to what you faced in 2014?
KONYNDYK: There is always a risk that travelers could come here, take the disease here and then begin spreading it. Now, I think what we saw in 2014 was cases were detected fairly quickly, and we didn't see a - it didn't spark a significant second wave of an outbreak here in the United States. But, of course, with COVID, that did happen. We have seen other - you know, other cases.
The global HIV epidemic right now is really at risk of getting out of control because of these - the foreign aid cuts by the Trump administration. That certainly would affect the United States. So there are all kinds of disease risks that can reach the United States and spread here and cause a lot of harm here if we don't control them overseas.
RASCOE: Can other groups step up and take the place of U.S. government funding?
KONYNDYK: There's really no donor that operates at the scale of the United States. Maybe Europe collectively does, but that's already in the system, and many European countries are cutting as well. So there really is nothing to fill this gap.
RASCOE: That's Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked at USAID during the Obama and Biden administrations and is now president of Refugees International. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
KONYNDYK: Thank you.
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