Did DOGE Cause the Ebola Outbreak?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
He’s treated Ebola; he’s had Ebola. Here’s what he thinks of the growing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and how America can and should respond.
Guest: Dr Craig Spencer, emergency doctor, professor at Brown.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline Ducharme, Patrick Fort, Rob Gunther and Paige Osburn.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I heard there was a new and rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak, there was basically one person I wanted to talk to, Craig Spencer. |
| 0:17.5 | People ask me this, like, do you feel PTSD? Do you have flashbacks? Like, what does it make you think? |
| 0:24.7 | Craig is a doctor, a pandemic expert. Also, he had Ebola. He got sick right in the middle of New York City, a little more than a decade ago. |
| 0:34.8 | It makes me realize that I have a very short window where I can be useful. And I'm like, |
| 0:41.2 | oh, for the next week, people who otherwise wouldn't listen to me are going to have to listen to me. |
| 0:47.0 | Craig was infected in 2014. He'd been treating Ebola patients in West Africa. Then he got home, |
| 0:54.1 | and he spiked a fever. I interviewed |
| 0:56.2 | him back then. Despite its common perception as a disease that makes you bleed, Ebola is maybe |
| 1:02.8 | best described as the flu from hell. It can go from headache to vomiting to organ failure, fast, and it is very contagious if you come |
| 1:14.3 | in contact with the patient's body fluids. Craig doesn't really like talking about what that |
| 1:20.0 | meant for him physically. No, I mean, I had the best case scenario of the worst case scenario, |
| 1:25.2 | right? I was treated in a high-quality facility. I had 30 to 40 providers taking care of me at any point, and I was taking care of 30 to 40 folks |
| 1:32.9 | in Guinea. And so even though my 19 days were no cakewalk and I wouldn't recommend them to anybody, |
| 1:39.5 | they were nothing in comparison to, you know, that dozens or really hundreds of patients that I saw. |
| 1:46.3 | You've written about how, like, you'd treat whole families, and they'd be caring for each other |
| 1:50.8 | and how affecting it was. |
| 1:54.4 | Yeah, I remember there was one family that came in late at night on two motorcycles. |
| 1:59.2 | I think there was, like, seven folks in the family. That was like |
| 2:02.1 | the first family that was, you know, quote unquote mine that I was going to take care of after I, |
| 2:06.3 | you know, trained. And I got really close to them. And it was such a humbling experience. One, because |
| 2:14.0 | I learned a lot about a bullet, too, because I learned how horrible a bullet can be, particularly for kids. |
| 2:18.8 | You know, for young people, it felt universally fatal. |
... |
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