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

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

Issue is that the kind of on-the-ground response will also be more problematic, partly because testing is more difficult.

You can't do the rapid genetic testing that we are all familiar with because of the COVID pandemic here.

That strain is not amenable to it.

But also because there are just fewer healthcare workers to throw at the problem and the community based response will just be more problematic than it has been in recent outbreaks.

Look, I think it's something of a perfect storm.

So the outbreaks in the east of the DRC, where I actually was a few weeks ago reporting another story.

And in the East, there is very little state presence.

The capital of Congo is two thousand kilometers away.

And there's this constellation of armed groups which make providing medical care difficult at the best of times.

At the same time, you've had these well documented cuts to to public health aid, which America was always in the leader of amongst Western countries.

So as it happens, I was at

uh NGO-led clinic in Goma where there's just been a case announced of Ebola.

And I was there to see how they were dealing with a measles outbreak.

And similar factors were at play there.

vaccines weren't getting to people who needed them.

And also the types of community health workers that you would need to actually do the response weren't as numerous as they had been in the past.

So if you think about what might be the case for an even more deadly virus, then that's what we're seeing today.

So it's not just the aid cuts, but because they're coming on top of an already difficult situation, they certainly don't help

Overnight the US has announced an extra thirteen million dollars of funding, which sounds fine, but it is a fraction relative to what the US was spending a decade ago on that West African outbreak.

It's also suspended travel for people who've recently been in DRC, South Sudan, and Uganda.

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