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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Mistrusting the process: containing Congo’s Ebola outbreak · 1 Jun 2026 podcast

On animals.

So at best, we're talking two or three months before that is in vials ready to ship.

It gets worse before it gets better.

But I think with Ebola, it's important to keep some perspective, as hard as that may be.

It's a virus that causes some hysteria in some places.

It is clearly the most concerning outbreak in Africa since at least twenty eighteen, if not twenty fourteen, and many hundreds, if not thousands, of people are likely to die.

But that number can be kept down if the field operations can be surged, if politicians get their act together, and hopefully if scientists can work their miracles as well.

So we're playing catch up, but it's not too late to limit this somewhat.

Thank you, Jason.

The Intelligence from The Economist · Spread too thin: Africa’s next Ebola outbreak · 19 May 2026 podcast

What we know so far is that this Ebola outbreak seems to be shaping up to be the worst since twenty fourteen, sixteen, when more than ten thousand people died in West Africa.

Initial data suggests that more than a hundred people have died in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, perhaps around four hundred cases.

But these are almost certainly underestimates and it's safe to assume that the virus has probably been spreading for a few weeks in eastern DRC and could well be in Burindi, Rwanda, South Sudan, in addition to other parts of the region.

Africa has gotten a lot better at dealing with Ebola.

I mean, this is the seventeenth outbreak on the continent over the past fifty years.

And there are basically two reasons for that.

The first is thanks to scientific brilliance, there are now vaccines for some of the Ebola strains, which allows you to create a kind of proverbial ring fence around outbreaks.

And then the second is that on the ground teams of community health workers have gotten a lot better at building trust with local communities, explaining how the virus spreads, and then ultimately quarantining and dealing with outbreaks like this.

Not quite, because those two positive developments that we've seen over the past decade or so are not as apparent in this particular instance.

So the strain that has emerged in Eastern DRC over the past few weeks, the Bundy Bujo strain, there is no known vaccine against it, although there may be some experiments done in the next few weeks.

And then the second issue.

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