Former ‘Ebola czar’ on the current outbreak in Africa
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
Now, with a fast-growing outbreak of a different strain of Ebola, in a different part of Africa, the public health infrastructure to address an outbreak has vastly changed, following the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID.
In this episode, Klain talks about the role USAID played in responding to the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic, and assesses whether today’s outbreak poses more or less of a risk to people in the United States.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's considered this, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, Ebola. In just a matter of days, public health officials went from announcing a new outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo to declaring the outbreak an international public health emergency. |
| 0:16.0 | That is incredibly fast. This already makes it on day one, one of the largest Ebola outbreaks ever recorded. |
| 0:22.7 | Dr. Craig Spencer knows firsthand the damage Ebola can cause. He helped fight a different strain in |
| 0:29.1 | West Africa just over a decade ago and also contracted Ebola himself while caring for patients. |
| 0:35.6 | The death toll and infection rate in this current outbreak continues to climb with more than 130 deaths and over 500 cases linked to the virus. |
| 0:44.7 | What concerns me the most is we learned too much, too quickly for this to be anything but really bad. |
| 0:50.7 | All of this is unfolding at a time when the Trump administration has disrupted or dismantled |
| 0:55.8 | public health infrastructure at home and abroad. Those all have dramatic impacts. Look, we lost a lot of |
| 1:01.6 | CDC staff and a lot of our CDC staff are now in Nebraska helping with Hunter virus. |
| 1:06.2 | We lost USAID that was responsible for helping be our eyes and ears and detecting outbreaks like this. |
| 1:12.5 | And we withdrew from the WHO, which is already pretty thin in terms of dealing with |
| 1:16.7 | hanta virus and other outbreaks. Those cuts over the last year have definitely had an impact. |
| 1:21.2 | And unfortunately, we're seeing the fallout from that right now. |
| 1:24.9 | Consider this. As Ebola spreads across central and East Africa, how will those cuts to public health |
| 1:30.6 | organizations affect the response? |
| 1:37.7 | From NPR. |
| 1:50.0 | The death toll of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda continues to climb. |
| 1:56.0 | Days after the World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency of international concern. |
| 2:02.0 | I'm deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic. |
| 2:07.9 | That is W.H.O. Director General Tedros Adadam, Gabrieso, speaking earlier today in Geneva. |
| 2:14.5 | Joining me now to talk about the global response to this outbreak is Ron Clayne. He is |
| 2:19.1 | the former White House Ebola response coordinator under President Obama and of course later |
... |
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