Ebola and the Unraveling of American Competence

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent sixteen months weakening public health infrastructure. The timing could not be worse.

In late April 2026, a hospital in Bunia Health Zone in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) identified a cluster of severe illnesses affecting healthcare workers. The presenting symptoms were alarming but not distinctive: fever, vomiting, the kind of presentation that could indicate any number of pathogens in a region where malaria, typhoid, and dengue circulate constantly. Initial rapid tests came back negative for Ebola. Healthcare workers began treatment based on what they saw. By May 15, eight of thirteen blood samples tested positive for something else entirely. The virus that had terrified the world fifteen years earlier had returned. By May 22, cases had appeared in Kampala, Uganda. The disease had crossed a border. It had found an airport. It was somewhere between Central Africa and everywhere else, and the world was not prepared to respond.

This outbreak, the 17th in the DRC since 1976, was caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, a rarer variant than the Zaire species that devastated West Africa between 2013 and 2016. It arrived during a moment of cascading institutional erosion. The United States, the world’s largest funder of the World Health Organization, had withdrawn from the institution five months earlier. The Secretary of Health leading America’s pandemic response had spent decades as the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist. The CDC had experienced sustained disruption under new leadership. And the virus emerged into a landscape of fragmented information, diminished trust in authority, and the peculiar modern hubris that assumes systems will function indefinitely regardless of how aggressively they are dismantled.

What makes this moment dangerous is not the virus itself. Ebola, while terrifying, is actually harder to transmit than measles or many COVID variants. What makes it dangerous is the gap between the threat it represents and the capacity of weakened institutions to respond. That gap did not emerge by accident. It was created through deliberate policy choices made in Washington over the past sixteen months.

Ebola belongs to a family of viruses called orthoebolaviruses. Four species affect humans, including Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo, and Taï Forest. The current outbreak involves Bundibugyo, first identified in Uganda in 2007. The disease begins like many other infections: fever, fatigue, muscle pain, headache. That familiarity makes it dangerous. In early stages, Ebola can resemble malaria, typhoid, influenza, or dozens of common illnesses. But in severe cases, the virus attacks systematically. It infects immune cells and damages blood vessels from the inside. The immune system overreacts. Organs fail. Patients develop vomiting, diarrhea, rash, internal bleeding, hemorrhage from the mouth, eyes, and gastrointestinal tract. Death comes through shock and multi-organ failure.

Across outbreaks, Ebola’s fatality rate has ranged from roughly 25 percent to nearly 90 percent depending on the strain and local healthcare capacity. The Bundibugyo strain has historically carried lower mortality than Zaire, which killed 11,000 people in West Africa, but it remains extraordinarily dangerous. There is currently no approved vaccine for Bundibugyo Ebola virus disease. Treatment is supportive: fluids, oxygen, blood products, organ support, isolation. Doctors keep patients alive long enough for their immune systems to fight back. Sometimes those immune systems win. Often they do not.

Epidemiologists measure contagiousness using the basic reproduction number, or R₀. It estimates how many people, on average, one infected person will infect in a population with no immunity and no interventions. For Ebola, R₀ falls between roughly 1.5 and 2.5. That makes it far less contagious than measles, which can exceed an R₀ of 12, and less transmissible than the most infectious COVID variants. But R₀ is not destiny. It changes depending on conditions. In a modern hospital with trained staff and protective equipment, transmission can be sharply reduced. In overcrowded clinics without adequate supplies, in conflict zones where healthcare systems barely function, in communities where frightened families care for dying relatives at home, that same virus becomes dramatically harder to contain.

Ebola spreads through direct contact with blood or bodily fluids. It is not airborne. That distinction matters enormously—it makes containment theoretically possible. But Ebola’s relatively lower transmissibility has always been its secondary advantage. Its real danger is not how it spreads but what happens when it does. The virus kills visibly, bloodily, in ways that create panic independent of actual transmission risk. And it kills in places where panic itself can collapse systems.

As of late May 2026, the World Health Organization reported hundreds of suspected cases in the DRC, with confirmed transmission into Uganda, including cases in Kampala. On May 16, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus determined that the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern. There is no approved vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain. There is no antiviral treatment waiting in reserve. Containment depends on the oldest tools in public health: surveillance, isolation, contact tracing, protective equipment, functioning hospitals, public trust, and speed. It depends on information moving faster than fear. It depends on institutions that have the credibility to ask people to do difficult things.

And speed is exactly what the modern world has become worst at.

For most of human history, distance itself limited outbreaks. A virus emerging in a remote village might run out of people to infect before reaching a population center. Modern transportation erased that protection. A person exposed in eastern Congo can reach a major international airport within a day. Symptoms may not appear for up to three weeks. This person lands in New York, London, Atlanta, or any point on the planet with an airport. The geographic boundaries that once contained disease no longer exist.

The irony is that humanity became extraordinarily good at managing exactly these kinds of threats—just in time to begin dismantling the institutions responsible for doing it.

The World Health Organization has never been especially beloved. It is bureaucratic, political, frustratingly cautious, and perpetually underfunded. It is also the closest thing the world has to a centralized system for tracking infectious disease. During outbreaks, WHO coordinates laboratories, issues alerts, moves personnel, standardizes protocols, and helps countries share information quickly enough to matter. It is not perfect. It is the system we have.

For decades, the United States was WHO’s single largest funder. Between 2024 and 2025, the US contributed $261 million annually, accounting for roughly 18 percent of the organization’s budget. Then, on January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the organization. The withdrawal became effective on January 22, 2026. American funding stopped. Personnel were recalled. The stated rationale cited the organization’s handling of COVID-19, its failure to reform, and claims about excessive deference to China. The actual consequence was that the world’s primary disease-coordination body lost its largest funder at a moment when zoonotic outbreaks were accelerating globally.

That policy decision now intersects with another.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services on February 13, 2025, following a 52-48 Senate vote. He entered office after years spent as the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist. Before joining government, he repeatedly promoted claims linking vaccines to autism despite overwhelming scientific evidence disproving the connection. He ran an organization called Children’s Health Defense that spread misinformation about vaccine safety. Under his leadership, HHS has cut vaccine-development programs, disrupted public-health leadership, and overseen deep instability across agencies responsible for pandemic preparedness.

In September 2025, nine former CDC directors published an open letter in the New York Times stating that Kennedy was “endangering” the nation’s health by citing “flawed research” to justify new policies. These were not fringe critics. These were people who had spent their careers running the Centers for Disease Control. They looked at what Kennedy was doing and warned that it would get people killed. The warning was issued, the letter was published, and the dismantling continued.

Kennedy has fired or forced out several leaders at HHS, including four directors at the National Institutes of Health and the FDA’s former vaccine chief. He has overseen cuts to scientific research, with the NIH slashing billions in research projects. Most significantly, he terminated $500 million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology. This matters because mRNA technology proved itself during COVID-19. It showed the approach works. It is being studied for applications beyond respiratory viruses: cancer vaccines, malaria vaccines, broader infectious disease protection. Kennedy terminated half a billion dollars in research on the technology most likely to help with future pandemics.

On May 11, 2026, just days before the Ebola outbreak became international news, Kennedy terminated the appointments of two doctors chairing the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which determines when insurance must provide free preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies for millions of Americans. The letters of termination offered no explanation.

The significance of this damage is easy to miss during normal times. Public-health infrastructure succeeds invisibly. When systems work, catastrophe does not happen. There is no political reward for maintaining laboratory capacity or surveillance networks. Preparedness feels wasteful until the precise moment it becomes indispensable. COVID-19 should have permanently altered how governments think about that reality. Instead, much of the political response to the pandemic evolved into a backlash against expertise itself. The institutions that coordinated vaccine campaigns, surveillance, and emergency guidance became targets of resentment rather than lessons in state capacity.

Now another dangerous pathogen is spreading through one of the most unstable regions in the world at the exact moment international public-health coordination is weaker, more fragmented, and less trusted than it was a decade ago.

To be clear: there is no evidence of sustained Ebola transmission outside Central Africa. The immediate risk to Americans remains low. CDC screening measures and travel protocols exist precisely because public-health officials understand how these diseases move. The system, diminished as it is, has mechanisms built in.

But low risk is not impossible risk. And low risk can change very quickly when a virus boards an airplane.

Modern societies have developed a strange confidence that systems will continue functioning no matter how aggressively they are degraded. We assume hospitals will absorb shocks indefinitely. We assume scientific expertise can be replaced by ideology without consequence. We assume international cooperation is optional because crises still appear distant—until suddenly they are not. We mistake luck for competence until luck runs out.

Pandemics are stress tests of institutional competence. They reveal whether governments can process information honestly. Whether experts retain authority to speak truth. Whether populations trust public guidance. Whether states can act collectively before panic arrives. Ebola remains frightening not because it is unstoppable, but because it demonstrates how quickly modern systems fail when trust erodes and expertise is systematically dismantled.

Why Your Support Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

---

References

1. World Health Organization. “Epidemic of Ebola Disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda determined a public health emergency of international concern.” WHO Disease Outbreak News, May 16, 2026.

2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Ebola Disease: Current Situation.” CDC Website, May 2026.

3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Ebola Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.” Health Alert Network, May 15, 2026.

4. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. “Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.” ECDC Alert, May 17, 2026.

5. Al Jazeera. “US to withdraw from dozens of UN, international organisations.” January 8, 2026.

6. The White House. “Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization.” Presidential Actions, January 20, 2025.

7. Kaiser Family Foundation. “Largest donor to the WHO for the 2024-2025 period.” KFF Analysis, 2025.

8. The Emory Wheel. “1 year after RFK Jr. appointment, public health community responds to policy changes.” February 18, 2026.

9. NPR. “RFK Jr. made promises to get his job as health secretary. He’s broken many of them.” February 13, 2026.

10. PBS News. “In a tumultuous year, U.S. health policy transforms under RFK Jr.” January 2, 2026.

11. The Washington Post. “White House, RFK Jr. shake up health leadership after controversies.” February 14, 2026.

12. The New York Times. “Open letter from nine former CDC leaders regarding health department policies.” September 1, 2025.