At least 50 are dead due to a new Ebola outbreak in Central Africa, and the U.S. was the last to hear about it. This is a glaring example of the breakdown in the U.S. public health and monitoring system.
Three programs have traditionally acted as layers of defense: the Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. All three have been gutted under the Trump administration, so early detection, disease tracking, and vaccine development have all been sidelined.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Roccascalegna, totally butchered the pronunciation of that one. Anyway, it’s Castle and there’s a more castle and mountains. Anywho, today I want to talk about something that hasn’t really made the news in the United States, but probably should. There’s a new Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. At least 50 people dead at this point.
The numbers keep rising by the day, and the topic is why we really haven’t heard of it. There’s kind of a three line system of defense when it comes to new infectious diseases in the United States. The first of all things is USAID, the agency for International Development. That was basically it does development work in countries to help them get on their feet, deal with disaster relief, that sort of thing.
Recovery in conflict zones. All that good stuff. Normally, this means that we’ve got thousands of American citizens working for the government all around the world, and they notice things. And so while, yes, economic development by far is their credo and their job, they actually serve as kind of a first line of defense for the intelligence community because they see things in the communities that they’re in.
Well, USAID was dismantled and closed by the Trump administration last year, so we didn’t get any advance warning of this outbreak. Second, you’ve got the center for Disease Control, which does all the genetic testing and mapping of diseases and the epidemiology and all that fun stuff. Well, it’s been gutted and under new leadership, including RFK Jr, who’s in charge of the overall health approach in the United States.
It’s basically not present in most parts of the world. So normally when an outbreak like this happens, the CDC is the first or the second call that is made to try to figure out what the disease is, how it’s communicated, how lethal it is, all that good stuff that has basically stopped. And it wasn’t until last week that the CDC got the call.
And that’s well after three weeks after it was discovered locally. The third thing is something called Barda, which is kind of like DARPA, the defense operation that explores new technologies. Bart does the same thing, but it maintains a pipeline for new vaccines. Well, Bart has basically been gutted and funding as well, because RFK has basically decided that vaccines are bad.
So we’re finding out about this late. Definitely on the back foot. And only now is the sequencing process starting. For those of you who don’t know what a bola is, it’s pretty nasty. It’s a hemorrhagic fever, which is a technical term of saying that you bleed from everywhere eyes, nose, ears, but fingernails, everything. And basically your body falls apart from the inside out.
It’s a particularly nasty way to go. And at the moment, we’re barely looking for it. So political decisions have consequences. And one of these means that Ebola may be coming to a town here, you. Which is nasty, but the only bright spot I have is from the information that has been reported through the W.H.O., World Health Organization, which the US is no longer cooperating with.
So this is something they told us out of the goodness of their heart rather than out of any sort of contractual obligation. It does appear at the moment that this new strain, I believe, is how it’s pronounced. Probably butchered. That too is no different from normal Ebola, and that it is spread by bodily fluid contact rather than by respiration.
Just keep in mind that diseases change all the time. As we learned with Covid, and we’re now in a situation basically where if it does change, we won’t know until it’s here. So food for thought.
