Dr. Craig Spencer is a public health professor and emergency medicine physician at Brown University who survived Ebola in 2014. He says it's not a coincidence that the world is seeing a new outbreak of the disease, as well as hantavirus and rising rates of measles in the United States. "If you recall, it was just over a year ago that Elon Musk gleefully declared that they were throwing USAID into the wood chipper. And you may recall that Elon Musk also sheepishly said at his first Cabinet meeting that he mistakenly canceled Ebola prevention but turned it back on. For many folks, the story ended there, but what actually happened was there was an Ebola outbreak, and DOGE and Elon Musk cut all the support that we normally would have been giving to respond to that Ebola outbreak. The result was that exactly USAID, who in the past would have been supporting things like airport screening in Uganda, was not providing that logistical or financial support. USAID and other partners would have been providing support to make sure testing was adequate, to make sure a vaccine rollout could have taken place, but we didn’t have USAID on the ground. "Similarly, CDC has long had relationships in this part of the continent, in Congo and in Uganda, and a lot of those relationships have broken down and withered over the past year, because we just haven’t been paying. Similarly, the U.S. has pulled out of the World Health Organization over the last year, which means that in normal circumstances our CDC folks are not able to even talk to World Health Organization people, something that is absolutely unbelievable and an incredible mistake for something that we should be able to do and be prepared for at all points. "And the result is what we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks with hantavirus, we’ve seen with the dramatic increase in number of measles cases in the U.S., and now Ebola in DR Congo and across the border in Kampala. This is not all just a coincidence. This is a consequence of us cutting back our support, not only here at home, but also abroad. democracynow.org/2026/5/18/e…