Speaking at President Trump's cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Elon Musk spoke bluntly about his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
"We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect," he said. "When we make mistakes, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention."
USAID is the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has largely been dismantled by the Trump administration.
"We restored the Ebola prevention immediately — and there was no interruption," Musk continued.
In past Ebola outbreaks — such as when the infectious viral disease swept through much of West Africa in 2014 and 2016 — the U.S. has played a significant role in helping countries respond. They've provided expert advice as well as funds for efforts to control the spread of the virus — for example, helping pay for the secure transportation of suspected Ebola specimens from clinics to labs for testing and for exit screening at airports, where people leaving the country are checked to make sure they are not infected with Ebola.
Assessing Musk's assessment
So is Musk accurate in his description of "accidentally" canceling and then restoring America's "Ebola prevention" efforts?
Public health experts say his comments were partly right: U.S. efforts were indeed interrupted.
But he got some facts wrong, they say: U.S. support has not been fully restored.
"I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. He says he's in regular contact with officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who work on Ebola as well as physicians on the ground in Uganda, where an outbreak was declared on January 30, with nine confirmed cases and one death — of a nurse — so far.
As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance. Acknowledging the absence of U.S. support, on February 2, Dr. Mike Ryan said in an interview with NPR that the World Health Organization "will step in to provide resources for those functions." Ryan is the director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program.
Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak. He is now the president of Refugees International.
Konyndyk used to lead what was called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID, which deployed on the ground in disasters like Ebola. "The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists. All of those people are gone. The operation centers that they worked out of are shut down. They can't even access the Ronald Reagan Building where those operation centers sit. That lease has been handed over to Customs and Border Protection," he says.
He called Musk's reassurance that things have been restored "total garbage."
Inquiries to USAID and the State Department about what was canceled and restored, and when, were not answered. Instead, a State Department spokesperson wrote: "The most important question we're answering during this review is: does it make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous? This is a process. If errors are made, they will be flagged and corrected as needed, while striving to do what's best for the American people."
In response to an earlier inquiry about the U.S. role in the outbreak in Uganda, a spokesperson for the State Department wrote to NPR on February 14 that the U.S. government officials "are working directly with the Government [of Uganda] to assess and identify evolving needs."
As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO. The World Health Organization often serves a critical function in outbreak responses. Even if the response is led by the country in which the outbreak is happening, WHO provides expert advice and helps coordinate efforts.
CDC officials "aren't allowed to go to meetings with the World Health Organization, something they would have done in every single outbreak of Ebola — or other viral hemorrhagic fever disease – to date," Spencer says. "From top to bottom, none of the things that they have canceled have been put back in place."
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