Donald Trump botched COVID, but his new gift to the world is an Ebola outbreak

By gutting the CDC’s rapid-response capacity, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and abolishing USAID, the Trump administration systematically dismantled the very global containment infrastructure needed to stop the Ebola outbreak—transforming a volatile regional crisis into a cross-border catastrophe that makes his spectacular COVID failures look like a warm-up act.

The Ebola outbreak in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is not being contained. It is growing. The official count now stands at roughly a thousand suspected cases, with a quarter of that number dead. The virus has crossed into Uganda.

The epicenter is Ituri province, a place where the government’s authority has always been thin and where the current response has made a bad situation worse.

The provincial capital, Bunia, is under a near-total flight ban. Commercial and most humanitarian aircraft are not allowed in or out. The stated purpose is to keep the virus from spreading by air. The actual effect has been to keep supplies, testing equipment, and trained staff from getting in.

Ebola spreads through direct mucous-membrane contact with infected bodily fluids (blood, vomit, stool, urine, sweat, saliva, semen)—not airborne—but aerosol-generating procedures like intubation and suctioning demand N95 respirators, a requirement reinforced by the 50% case fatality rate and the precautionary principle.

For every suspect case, full personal protective equipment (double gloves, gown, waterproof apron, face shield, boot covers) must be donned before entry and doffed under direct supervision to prevent self-contamination. Any unprotected exposure requires immediate reporting to IPC and public health authorities—never wait for lab confirmation.

Aid organizations are working with one hand tied.

The Lancet recently published a report that looked back at the 2014-2016 West African epidemic and found that such bans did little to stop international spread.

They did, however, disrupt the movement of health workers and essential supplies, damage local economies, and drive people to informal border crossings that are harder to track. That is the pattern here.

Complicating matters is the history of the response itself. In previous Ebola outbreaks in the DRC, contracts for gravedigging and disinfection were currency.

People hired for those jobs were pressured to kick back a portion of their wages, or sexual services, to the local officials who secured the work. That memory does not fade.

It is no mystery why many in Ituri view the current quarantine measures with deep suspicion. Online conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum left by official credibility.

Meanwhile, the burial teams are attacked. Families demand traditional rites for the dead, even when the body remains infectious. Militias control large stretches of the countryside.

The extractive industries have carved up the land for decades, and there is unrelenting brutal fighting over what is left.

The global apparatus that might have helped has been dismantled, piece by piece.

The Trump administration’s “America First” policy has been rhetorically clear and practically devastating. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been gutted of its pandemic rapid-response capacity.

The United States left the World Health Organization in January, and its contributions of medical expertise, equipment, and logistics have been replaced by bilateral memorandums of understanding, which aren’t quite the same.

The U.S. foreign aid agency, USAID, has been effectively abolished.

USAID’s past work in other countries was not always benign, but the complete withdrawal of its logistical and medical support has left a gaping hole that no other nation has filled.

A plan by the U.S. to open a quarantine and treatment facility in Kenya for Americans exposed to the virus is now on hold.

A court challenge and street protests have stalled it. The Kenyan High Court suspended the U.S. plan to establish the 50-bed quarantine unit at the Laikipia Air Base, strictly prohibiting the transfer of patients from third countries to Kenya.

Legal advocates, including the Katiba Institute and the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU), warned that it posed “grave and imminent risks” to public health.

The opposition is twofold: Kenyans do not want Ebola patients brought into their country, and they are openly angry at the idea of a treatment center reserved exclusively for U.S. citizens, despite being one of 22 African countries that signed bilateral agreements on global health cooperation with the United States under its America First Global Health Strategy (AFGHS).

Violent protests broke out in Nanyuki, with locals and business owners questioning why Kenya should bear the threat of importing a highly deadly pathogen to secure American lives.

Medical workers expressed alarm at the lack of proven Ebola containment infrastructure within Kenya’s already strained public health system. The general secretary of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union, Davji Bhimji Attelah, called it an apartheid healthcare model.

He threatened strikes and accused his own government of trading national biosecurity and the lives of its citizens for foreign aid. The facility is not built.

The truth of this century is that zoonotic diseases are not anomalies. They are the product of systems.

Ramped-up agricultural production, rising consumption, and deforestation have pushed human settlements into viral reservoirs that were once remote.

The short-term maximization of profit is the common thread, and many third-world residents view that as the American way.

It drove the conditions that allowed HIV to cross species, that turned SARS into a global scare, and that made the coronavirus a pandemic. It is the same logic that puts a flight ban over a dying province while the helicopters that could bring vaccines sit idle on the other side of the border.

The Ebola virus does not respect memorandums of understanding. It does not respect court orders. It respects biology, and biology is not waiting for the politics to catch up.