Rubio criticizes WHO’s Ebola response as US continues sweeping public health cuts
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Tuesday that the World Health Organization (WHO) was “a little late” in identifying the deadly Ebola
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Tuesday that the World Health Organization (WHO) was “a little late” in identifying the deadly Ebola outbreak in the the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. On Tuesday, Rubio told reporters: “The lead is obviously going to be CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and the World Health Organization, which was a little late to identify this thing unfortunately.” His comments follow Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the WHO, a move which experts described as “sowing the seeds of the next pandemic”. Trump made the move in one of his first acts on returning to office last year. The US’s departure also led to the loss of nearly a quarter of the WHO’s workforce – about 2,000 jobs – from a total staff of about 9,400. Rubio said that the US, which has committed about $13m in assistance after sweeping aid cuts last year, was hoping to open about 50 clinics to treat Ebola in the DRC. “It’s a little tough to get to because it’s in a rural area … and [a] hard-to-get-to place in a war-torn country, unfortunately,” Rubio said. “We’re going to lean into that pretty heavy.” The WHO said earlier on Tuesday that it was concerned about the “scale and speed” of the Ebola outbreak that has killed an estimated 131 people in the DRC.
Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, rejected Rubio’s criticism of the WHO. “Blaming the WHO is misplaced, because they are operating with limited resources in a difficult setting with many security challenges. But it’s also cold comfort for all the people who have gotten Ebola and died. And this should concern Americans as well. It’s highly worrisome given that public health resources in the US have been slashed and even a couple of cases in the US would be challenging with our current workforce,” Gronvall said. She added: “It is a strategic mistake – and a national security vulnerability – that we are worse off now to handle infectious disease threats than at the start of Covid-19. Hantavirus [and] Ebola are terrible, serious diseases but they are not as transmissible as some other infectious disease threats we could face. Instead of dismantling everything, we need to invest in the vaccines, diagnostic testing, and public health and hospital responses we would need to protect Americans.” On Sunday, the WHO announced that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda was a “public health emergency of international concern”, saying: “Neighboring countries sharing land borders with the Democratic Republic of the Congo are considered at high risk for further spread due to population mobility, trade and travel linkages, and ongoing epidemiological uncertainty.
The BriefWire