John McDermott
speaker
167 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 1 Jun
John McDermott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You need to manage them.
You need to track their contacts as well.
Of course, as I just mentioned, you also need to build the trust and support of local communities who are deeply distrustful of authority.
And while there has clearly been a lot of work going on, as I was speaking to people over the weekend, some of them were literally involved in the construction of isolation tents for NGOs like MSF.
There's no doubt that everyone on the ground in Aturi and neighboring areas would say they are playing catch up and the response has had a very slow start.
Well, it seems like Western politicians have belatedly woken up to the scale of the outbreak in Eastern DRC.
And we've seen over the past few days Britain, the European Union and the United States announce new funding in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more, and that will help pay for kit and health workers on the ground.
But the most important political capital isn't London or Washington.
It's actually Kinshasa, two thousand kilometres away.
And much will depend on the relationship between the central government in the DRC and those at a regional level.
And over the years, to say the least, that relationship has been somewhat testy.
So much will depend on whether the
Mongolese government can ensure that its authority on the ground can be imposed as well.
After the massive outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which began in twenty fourteen.
Scientists began working on vaccines for the most common strain of the virus, known as Zaire.
And that has helped health workers essentially ring fence evolution outbreaks when they've happened.
Unfortunately, this particular outbreak has a different strain, the Bundy Budjo strain, and there is as yet no license vaccine for it.
But as we saw during the COVID pandemic, scientists have become much better at moving at warp speed to develop vaccines.
And last week there was an announcement by Oxford University and India's Serum Institute that they were trying to develop a new experimental version of a vaccine which may work against this particular strain.
But they also cautioned that this is untested even.
Showing 41–60 of 167 · page 3 of 9
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