Dr. Steven Novella

There's a good article written by some infectious disease specialists called Panic, Neglect, Repeat.

The 2026 Ebola outbreak shows us we must change the pattern for global pandemic preparedness and response.

Basically making the case that we are less prepared, less prepared for this Ebola outbreak than we were for the previous one.

Partly because, and so what are the reasons for that?

Part of it is because of COVID-19.

We're still experiencing a backlash against public health measures and trust in science, trust in the governments, trust in public health measures, and that is hampering everything.

100%.

So the bigger, the far bigger factor here is we've gotten rid of the USAID, right?

It's basically completely defunded it.

And that's a huge, huge problem because even if we give money to this effort, like the United States is always the critical partner in any of these kinds of outbreaks because we have the most resources, right?

And that's not just money, but actual lots of relevant resources.

So in previous outbreaks, when USAID was up and running, we could say, okay, here's all the resources that you need, not only money, but vaccines and medicine and protective equipment and all the things that you need to get control over an outbreak like this.

And we had organizations and people on the ground with connections to organizations and people in the region to immediately put those things to work.

Now, all of those connections are gone.

They are gutted.

They don't exist anymore.

So we don't even have the ability to do the kinds of things that we could have done just two years ago because all of that infrastructure is gone.

So we say, okay, well, it's the World Health Organization's responsibility.

We just cut their funding by pulling out of the World Health Organization.

They had to fire 2,000 people.