Trump passed blame for a catastrophic failure — and triggered a global emergency

Under the heading of Fiddling While Rome Burns, a new potential viral plague is gaining steam in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda – a strain that has no targeted vaccine to prevent it nor treatment to cure it, making it a nightmare to try to contain.

But you know our president is too focused on his ballroom to give it much thought.

The reality is this: as of Tuesday, an Ebola virus outbreak in the above-named African nations had more than 500 suspected cases and some 130 deaths. According to the World Health Organization, It involves the much rarer Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, as opposed to the significantly more common Zaire form for which a vaccine and treatments exist.

How is the United States responding? Well, the State Department is “strongly urging” Americans not to travel to the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or Uganda, and to reconsider travel to Rwanda. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order barring foreigners from entering the U.S. if they were in any of the above-named countries in the previous 21 days. It assessed the risk to the general American public as “low.”

This is all well and good. The problem is that under President Trump, we have pulled out of the WHO and gutted the CDC, greatly restricting our capacity to monitor and respond to an international public health emergency like the Ebola one. We are now less able to detect, coordinate around and contain an Ebola threat early.

The weakening of our virus containment apparatus should concern everyone, disturbingly restricting many of the systems that matter most in the first days of an outbreak (i.e. right now). By leaving, the U.S. voluntarily ended formal participation in WHO technical committees and real-time surveillance groups and withdrew staff embedded in WHO operations. That means fewer U.S. personnel plugged into international outbreak intelligence.

The radical cuts to the CDC mean fewer epidemiologists and, therefore, less surge capacity and ability to respond quickly. In short, it points to a hampered ability to respond to Ebola before it arrives here and reduced resilience once it does.

Why did Trump withdraw us from the WHO? Because he blamed the organization for what he perceived as a delayed response to COVID when in fact it was merely scapegoated for the president’s own deplorable lack of urgency.

Public health experts widely regard America’s reaction to the COVID threat as massively slow and flawed. It could have been nipped in the bud, but Trump, early on, treated the virus less like a deadly health emergency than a temporary PR problem. If strong mitigation measures (mask guidance, distancing, limits on gatherings, testing expansion) had begun even two weeks earlier, it’s likely tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented.

Let’s take a look back at a partial timeline of Trump’s COVID response quotes:

February 2, 2020: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 10, 2020: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. The stock market is starting to look very good to me!”

February 26: “The 15 cases (in the U.S.) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

March 6: “You have to be calm. It’ll go away.”

March 15: “It’s something we have tremendous control over.”

By April 2020, U.S. deaths from COVID would surpass 20,000. By the end of 2020, there would be more than 385,000 confirmed COVID-related fatalities in the United States, making it the third-leading cause of death that year behind heart disease and cancer.

Ebola is a different beast altogether, of course. For the uninitiated, it’s an illness caused by a group of related viruses first discovered in 1976 in the nations now known as South Sudan and Congo in a region near the Ebola River. Fruit bats are thought to carry the viruses without being sickened by them.

People stricken with Ebola may first experience so-called “dry symptoms” such as fever, aches, pains and fatigue before progressing to “wet symptoms” that include diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding. It’s contracted through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected, sick or dead person and contaminated objects like clothing, bedding, needles or medical equipment.

Ebola is, more often than not, fatal. There have been several outbreaks since 2000, and in more than 70 percent of cases the victim died. It is clearly an extremely virulent virus that spreads easily through direct contact.

Are we vulnerable in America to an Ebola plague? Not in the traditional sense. Since it spreads only by direct contact and not through easy airborne transmission like COVID or the measles, a large uncontrolled U.S. spread is much less likely.

However, that doesn’t mean the disdain the Trump Administration has shown for any agency whose statistics he sees as a threat to his ability to spread propaganda doesn’t open us up to a far higher risk than necessary.

Stepping back from W.H.O. and thinning out the C.D.C. makes for a country that’s less preventive and more reactive. Think of it like removing smoke detectors because you already own a fire extinguisher. You still have tools, but you may well learn about the fire later than you should.

In short, Donald Trump is not the president you want when any disease starts spreading out of control. He is, in fact, the worst, because he makes it all about him and his ego rather than the good of the country he’s purportedly trying to protect.

The time to start planning for Ebola to reach our shores is right now. But I have a feeling no one inside TrumpWorld is thinking much about it. Not his hand-picked C.D.C. Not anyone with whom he deals daily. Certainly not Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr.

It’s especially at times like this when I mourn the fact we don’t have a real president.

Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.