Make Ebola great again

At today’s cabinet meeting, the president conceded that he and his incel army had made a few oopsies, but the problems have been corrected:

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."

[image or embed]— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 26, 2025 at 8:56 AM

Alas, Elon is as dishonest as his boss-only-on-paper:

Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.

“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.

Last month’s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that’s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.

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.

I continue to prefer legislative democracy to the new regime.