While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, about which he appears to have lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Once in office, roughly a year ago, Kennedy also decided to pull all funding from Gavi, an international public/private partnership to get vaccines to underserved nations, claiming that there would be no American funding because it “ignored vaccine safety”. He followed that up in April of this year by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated for international vaccination programs for the same reason.
Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.
“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.
That’s an excuse, of course. Kennedy doesn’t like vaccines, so he’s keeping poor people around the world from getting them. It’s as simple as that. Why he’s been allowed to veto the powers of the purse in Congress as the Secretary of HHS is a question that can be answered by pointing and laughing at our feckless Congress, but the result is the poorest human beings in the world being less protected from dangerous, infectious diseases.
It’s easy to be anti-vax when you aren’t confronted with the realities of these diseases. When, however, you get a vicious outbreak of a new strain of Ebola in Africa, and you start seeing pictures and hearing stories about the rashes, the uncontrollable bleeding, the piercing stomach pain, and the fountains of waste leaking out of people, well, that seems to have a way of clarifying the mind.
I can’t think of a better explanation as to why Marco Rubio informed Congress recently that the State Dept. was going to get involved to get us back to funding Gavi to combat this and other diseases.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the U.S. would re-engage with the global vaccine alliance Gavi amid the Ebola outbreak in several African countries. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision had been made a few weeks ago to re-engage, after the Trump administration pulled funding from Gavi last year.
Rubio said that Secretary Kennedy had taken a leading role in determining what was going to happen next with Gavi, but the State Department would now re-engage because “we need to drive this to an outcome”.
“The State Department a few weeks ago made the decision that we were going to re-engage on this issue of Gavi, respecting what HHS’ (Department of Health and Human Services) views are on it as well,” Rubio said. “We’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”
Rubio can massage the messaging on this all he likes, but it’s plain what is going on here. Craven as he may be in this current time, Rubio also isn’t an idiot. He damn well knows that outbreaks of infectious diseases, particularly those as horrifying as Ebola, will eventually impact his State Department and the homeland. This is him figuring out how to get an actual adult in the room to counteract Kennedy’s obstinate insanity.
And given that we don’t really know yet just how bad this Ebola outbreak is, it’s understandable that Gavi is sighing in relief at this news.
Gavi’s chief executive Sania Nishtar said she was “very encouraged” by Rubio’s remarks.
“Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats,” she said in a statement. Gavi’s work on Bundibugyo underlined the importance of this work, she said.
Between the courts and the Trump administration itself, there has been a great deal of blocking, tamping down, and walking back RFK Jr.’s activities.
Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that’s what Elon Musk wants us to believe.
At yesterday’s first official Musk/Trump administration cabinet meeting, Elon decided to share a cute little anecdote about his DOGE team’s approach to governing. Just a fun little story about how they “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention efforts. What a knee slapper!
Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect … so for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was ebola prevention."
Here’s Musk’s exact quote, which deserves to be read in full because, well, you’ll see:
We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But 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. [nervous chuckle] I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.
The only problem is that almost everything here is nonsense… well, except for the part about canceling the program on Ebola prevention. Musk absolutely did that. And some other terrible stuff as well. But the fixing the mistake part? That doesn’t appear to have actually happened. Oopsie!
[Nervous chuckle intensifies]
The Real Impact of “Accidental” Cuts
To be clear, this one scenario actually offers a really good case study in how dangerously short-sighted the Musk/DOGE efforts are, in which they have no clue what they’re doing, are slashing and burning, and figuring they can just “fix it very quickly after” when things go wrong.
Except, that’s often not how this works, and the things they’re doing are creating not just lasting damage, but real-time harms that can never be fixed.
So, first of all, they absolutely cut off Ebola prevention and it had real world consequences the day they did, because there was an Ebola outbreak reported in Uganda that very day. As Ebola expert (and survivor!) Dr. Craig Spencer explained, normally the US would send an Ebola expert to Uganda to help with the prevention, which they were unable to do, because Musk and DOGE basically made that impossible. Spencer’s explanation of what happened is maddening (this is just a snippet):
On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak. Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared.
And normally the U.S. would’ve helped set up border screening and other measures on the ground.
But this time, we didn’t.
Normally, we would’ve spoke with the WHO about helping end the outbreak.
But this time, we didn’t.
Because CDC staff weren’t even allowed to talk to them.
I’ve been told by a colleague that Uganda tried calling the White House to notify them of the outbreak for 2 days…but no one answered the phone. Two months ago we had amazing experts working on global health security there. Now there appears to be no one to pick up a phone.
Lies About ‘Fixing’ Those Mistakes
It turns out that Elon and DOGE actually fired 90% of the team working on it. Which raises an interesting question: How exactly do you “turn on” Ebola prevention when you’ve fired all the people who… you know… prevent Ebola?
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.
[….]
Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She calledthe recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.
“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.
Furthermore, contrary to Elon’s claim, it appears that the funds for Ebola prevention have not resumed at all:
Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri’s assessment.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” said one former official. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”
This should be terrifying. Even if you’re so myopic that you think “America First” means not doing any foreign aid work (and boy, is that a discussion for another day), surely you can recognize that preventing foreign outbreaks of deadly diseases helps protect Americans at home as well. Right? Right???
A Pattern of Destruction
And the Ebola example is just one example.
There have been multiple reports of how the DOGE team halted funding for PEPFAR, which is the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” started by George W. Bush that has been credited with saving over 26 million lives and limiting the spread of AIDS globally. But DOGE stopped the program.
In Africa, thousands of U.S.-funded health workers have been laid off and clinics have closed, restricting access to HIV testing and treatment. African health officials and experts have pleaded for PEPFAR to resume, fearing services that have become a key part of the health care system will be stripped in a way that sets countries back decades.
And even though Marco Rubio has promoted PEPFAR and claimed that he signed a limited waiver to keep some (not all) of it funded… reports are that the DOGE team has still blocked any PEPFAR funding from going through. As the AP reports:
“…aid groups say they know of no payments getting through for that or any program.”
And even though a court ordered USAID to continue its congressionally mandated funding efforts two weeks ago, the Musk/Trump administration has refused to do so. Yesterday, after the judge made it clear that they were walking into a contempt of court situation, the DOJ ran to the Supreme Court, which put a temporary pause on the order, giving the Court a couple more days to evaluate.
Meanwhile, people are dying. Right now. Today. While Elon and his DOGE crew chuckle about their “accidental” mistakes (all easily preventable if they hadn’t fired actual experts or just… asked people to explain what was happening), and then claimed they “immediately” fixed things they didn’t actually fix.
And we could easily go on. I mean, last week they “accidentally” fired all the experts working to prevent avian flu and then were scrambling to try to find them to rehire them. Because nothing says “competent governance” and “efficiency” quite like firing your bird flu experts in the middle of a bird flu outbreak, and then struggling to find the fired experts in order to beg them to come back.
It seems like everywhere you look, these kinds of “accidental” mistakes are being made, and they’re not being rectified.
But Elon and the DOGE crew think it’s all just a laugh.
It’s Not Just The Incompetence, It’s The Indifference
Here’s the thing about all of this: None of it had to happen. None of these “accidents” were inevitable. Even if you wanted to cut actual waste, fraud, and abuse (and who doesn’t?), there are ways to do that without, you know, accidentally dismantling global disease prevention infrastructure.
But there’s no interest from Musk or DOGE in figuring any of that out. Zero. Zilch. Nada. There’s not even a pretense of concern about the irreversible damage being done.
Not only do they have a total lack of intellectual curiosity to learn about the institutions and systems they’re destroying, there’s not even one bit of concern about the very real damage that has been done and can’t be fixed, even if they actually were turning back on the funding (which, again, it appears they’re not).
There are a million stories to be covering these days about all this, but this is a tragedy of epic proportions. And the only acknowledgment of it is a little giggle from Elon, in which he admits to just one part of the error, but falsely states they corrected it. Because apparently that’s where we are now: treating global health infrastructure like it’s a Twitter feature that can be rolled back with a quick deployment.
The real tragedy isn’t just the destruction of vital programs — it’s that lives are being treated as acceptable collateral damage in an ideological experiment, based off of a myth. Musk, DOGE, and the Project 2025 crew are completely bought into the false belief that federal government employees do nothing useful, that they don’t work, and almost all foreign aid is wasted.
When global health infrastructure built over decades is dismantled overnight, it can’t simply be restored with a presidential waiver or a tweet. What’s being lost here isn’t just money or bureaucracy, but institutional knowledge, relationships, and capacity that took years to build. And Musk shows no signs of learning this lesson at all. To him, it remains a joke and a meme to tweet. As people die.
There are plenty of fictional medical dramas where doctors miraculously discover a wrong diagnosis that leads to a recovery or a cure or… a highly suspicious murder suspect. Some of these stories are based in reality, but they aren’t filed under suspense or drama for no good reason. For all the budding script (not of the computer code variety) writers out there, here are just a few medical curiosities that might come in handy.
For years now, we’ve been talking up the importance of open access to scientific research. Big journals like Elsevier have generally fought against this at every point, arguing that its profits are more important that some hippy dippy idea around sharing knowledge. Except, as we’ve been trying to explain, it’s that sharing of knowledge that leads to innovation and big health breakthroughs. Unfortunately, it’s often pretty difficult to come up with a concrete example of what didn’t happen because of locked up knowledge. And yet, it appears we have one new example that’s rather stunning: it looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up.
That, at least, appears to be the main takeaway of a recent NY Times article by the team in charge of drafting Liberia’s Ebola recovery plan. What they found was that the original detection of Ebola in Liberia was held up by incorrect “conventional wisdom” that Ebola was not present in that part of Africa:
The conventional wisdom among public health authorities is that the Ebola virus, which killed at least 10,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was a new phenomenon, not seen in West Africa before 2013. (The one exception was an anomalous case in Ivory Coast in 1994, when a Swiss primatologist was infected after performing an autopsy on a chimpanzee.)
But, as the team discovered, that “conventional wisdom” was wrong. In fact, they found a bunch of studies, buried behind research paywalls, that revealed that there was significant evidence of antibodies to the Ebola virus in Liberia and in other nearby nations. There was one from 1982 that noted: “medical personnel in Liberian health centers should be aware of the possibility that they may come across active cases and thus be prepared to avoid nosocomial epidemics.” Then they found some more:
Three other studies published in 1986 documented Ebola antibody prevalence rates of 10.6, 13.4 and 14 percent, respectively, in northwestern Liberia, not far from its borders with Sierra Leone and Guinea. These articles, along with other forgotten reports from the 1980s on antibody prevalence in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea, suggest the possibility of what some call ?sanctuary sites,? or persistent, if latent, Ebola infection in humans.
So why did the conventional wisdom continue to insist that Ebola wasn’t likely to be the issue when Liberians started getting sick and dying? Well, a big part of it may have been the fact that the research was locked up:
Part of the problem is that none of these articles were co-written by a Liberian scientist. The investigators collected their samples, returned home and published the startling results in European medical journals. Few Liberians were then trained in laboratory or epidemiological methods. Even today, downloading one of the papers would cost a physician here $45, about half a week?s salary.
Yes, it still would have required the knowledge to be passed along to Liberian doctors and health officials, and one can argue that that might not have happened. But it seems a lot more likely that the information would have been more easily accessible and the knowledge passed around if it didn’t cost half a week’s salary just to download decades old research warning of just such a threat. And, of course, the results were catastrophic. Even once people started dying, doctors had a tremendous amount of difficulty figuring out what the issue was:
…it was months before Ebola was identified as the culprit pathogen. That made it impossible for the region?s few doctors and nurses to deliver effective care.
Open access isn’t just some “free culture” refrain. It really matters and can save lives.
Crowdfunding wallet designs and various gadgets may be fun and bring about some innovative products that might not normally get funding, but a lot of popular crowdfunding campaigns are relatively straightforward development projects and shouldn’t be all that risky for backers. Crowdfunding actual scientific ventures adds a bit more risk for backers because no one can really say how an experiment will turn out — unless the experiment has been done before. Adding to the challenge for scientific crowdfunding is the jargon and scientific understanding necessary for a backer to know what a particular project is actually trying to do. If you want to support some science, here are just a few science-related projects to check out.
Ebola is scary. Absolutely. It’s concerning that Ebola vaccines and treatments have not been developed as quickly as other pharmaceuticals, but the current outbreak is certainly speeding up research efforts. However, the economics of developing treatments for various ailments isn’t always rational, given the examples of the wild success of the ALS ice bucket challenge and the failures of its knockoffs. If you need a reminder of other deadly diseases that still plague the world, here are just a few links on the topic.
As you may have heard, there’s been a somewhat scary Ebola outbreak in western Africa. You may have also heard about what some are calling a “secret miracle serum” that effectively stops the impact of the virus for those who catch it. It’s an experimental drug that hasn’t undergone human clinical trials yet, but it was apparently given to a couple of Americans and appears to be working. There’s some indication that it would take a couple months to produce a larger number of doses — though, again, the lack of testing here means that people really aren’t sure if it will work (or if there are serious side effects).
?These outbreaks affect the poorest communities on the planet. Although they do create incredible upheaval, they are relatively rare events,? said Daniel Bausch, a medical researcher in the US who works on Ebola and other infectious diseases.
?So if you look at the interest of pharmaceutical companies, there is not huge enthusiasm to take an Ebola drug through phase one, two, and three of a trial and make an Ebola vaccine that maybe a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will use.?
While some may question whether or not Bausch’s statement is just from frustration from where he is, Big Pharma execs more or less confirm his claims. Remember that it was just a few months ago that we wrote about Bayer’s CEO claiming directly that they make drugs for rich people who can afford it:
Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license “essentially theft.”
“We did not develop this medicine for Indians,” Dekkers said Dec. 3. “We developed it for western patients who can afford it.”
As we noted at the time, it’s worth comparing that statement to what George Merck, the former President of Merck said many decades ago concerning the pharma industry:
We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.
It seems that we’ve come a long way from those days.
