Blaming Trump for the latest outbreak of Ebola is absurd

OPINION:

The Trump administration is again coming under fire for last year’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Why now? Because it’s being blamed for an outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease in Africa. The disease, centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has a disturbing 25% death rate.

Out with the boxing gloves come those very NGOs that lost billions in taxpayer funding with USAID’s demise.

One stone was cast by David Miliband, the president of New York-based International Rescue Committee (and a former foreign secretary for Britain’s Labor Party). “This current Ebola outbreak is a profound example of the short-sightedness that comes with aid cuts,” he complained.

NGO heavyweight Oxfam posits that “aid cuts left the DRC effectively blind to Ebola.” Refugees International’s Jeremy Konyndyk (a former Biden and Obama administration official) said that funding to the DRC “has been almost wiped out.” Media headlines abound that this could be “the worst outbreak in history.”

Yet, these accusations have no basis in fact.

The current Ebola outbreak is the DRC’s 17th. I should know, having served as the federal government’s lead for global disaster response in 2020, and having led efforts to contain two concurrent Ebola outbreaks, numbers 10 and 11.

For the NGOs and the media to suggest that this recurrent disease, indigenous to Africa for 50 years, is President Trump’s fault is absurd.

But these falsehoods are political payback for defunding foreign-aid groups who seek to exploit public fears of a deadly disease outbreak to pressure both the U.S. Congress and the administration to send more U.S. funds — through them.

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The main obstacles to containment of such disease outbreaks are armed conflict and associated migration — in the millions just within the DRC — as well as deep local distrust of international officials, not the lack of U.S. funding.

In the past 10 years, the U.S. government has spent $8 billion to support the DRC’s health system, yet the results have been decidedly poor. According to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, “repeated outbreaks in the DRC expose the world’s failure to build resilient health systems.”

In fact, the administration took immediate action following announcement of the outbreak and mobilized $200 million in emergency aid while it dispatched teams of health officials to the region.

As for the “worst outbreak in history,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports over 1,100 cases and over 300 confirmed deaths so far. This compares to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa with 28,610 cases and 11,308 deaths. There is scant prospect for the contagion to spread to the United States.

These kinds of hysterical accusations against the Trump administration for dismantling USAID are nothing new. A year ago, the multibillion-dollar global HIV-AIDS industry blew a gasket after the administration decided that after more than 20 years and $130 billion of effort it would change course and dispense with high-priced woke international aid groups and directly work with the governments of aid beneficiary countries.

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Pop idol Bono, founder of a global anti-AIDS NGO, falsely claimed that “300,000 people have already died.” Microsoft mogul Bill Gates — who previously could count on billions in U.S. government co-financing of his own global AIDS relief programs — warned “millions will die,” while a past administrator of USAID raised a strategic threat that aid recipients are “going to China and Russia.”

Quite the opposite happened. In the past six months, the State Department has signed bilateral health security agreements with over 30 developing countries. Far from having its funding “wiped out,” the DRC is set to receive another $1.2 billion in U.S. financing for anti-AIDS efforts.

In sum, as the administration’s aid reforms finally focus on strengthening the health systems of African states and improve their own front-line response mechanisms to contain diseases such as Ebola, it is disastrous for a foreign aid industry whose waste, fraud, and abuse of tens of billions in taxpayer funds is now a sad tale in the dustbin of foreign aid history.

• Max Primorac is a senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. He was a senior official during the George W. Bush administration and the first Donald Trump administration.

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