Ebola outbreak in DR Congo rages, with 61% death rate and funding running dry
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It would be nice if the US provided the money, but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place. Germany, France, etc., paid only $2 million, they could afford more. anAnd I say that as a European myself. Europe has to finally up their game instead of throwing pocket change in the ring, when in fact the Americans did all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, we act as the moral instance in all of this and now that the US isn't playing ball anymore the emperor stands naked.
The world is a fucking complex mess and it's all just state. All things are set up in a certain way at this point in time and interact. As a leader in this setup it's simply not sensible to point at a single thing and say "Weeeellll, this seems like it's not how it is for others — and I really don't like that!" and then just stop doing it, and use that as justification to disregard the total amount of additional suffering this course of action causes.
If you do, you are at best unfit to have any power but possibly also just evil.
Or maybe we start to question if there is a better way to do things. I don't want to say Trump is doing everything right, but at least he tries. He got the Rwandan president and the Congolese at one table and told them to stop the bullshit.
If Trump ends the war and gets Western countries into the DRC to do proper mining, the DRC will be one of the richest nations of all time, and they will finally have enough resources to educate their population on the dangers of fucking bush meat.
If an actor with power changes something with regards to the state of the world – which they obviously should, if they don't what are they doing? — the rational can not be "I think this singular thing is unfair, I will not do this anymore". If everyone did that, the world would collapse.
There is no concept of "fairness" that you can simply presume (and if it mattered at all, which it does not, it would certainly not be the US that draws the short straw). Everything is state and connected. You are not in kindergarten. This is the state of the world you have to work from, if you aim to be a serious and trustworthy actor, and the amount of suffering you willfully cause is not a detail.
(And just so we don't get side tracked, what I was responding to is exactly: "but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place")
It's entirely idiotic to then say "But hey, look at this single thing, I now decide to judge to be of utmost importance, what are you doing here right this second!?" Well maybe jack shit. And that may not be optimal, or it might be. But the important thing is: Any actor can find any amount of those isolated instances where someone did less/worse/different/bad, and then proceed to demand retribution on that basis and sabotage absolutely all cooperation in the process. But that is obviously idiotic.
I think it is very kindergarten-ish to shove $25M into the DRC on an almost yearly schedule. Almost like the kindergarten teacher telling Max not to take the shovel from Sarah every single day. I also think it is kindergarten-ish to look at Ebola in Congo and scream for US money (especially when the argument for that is that it make you a less serious and trustworthy actor if you don't).
We are not in kindergarten; we are, in fact, in the real world, and all nations have to face their own problems. The justification for Trump's fund slashing doesn't matter. Sure, people will suffer, but they suffered from Ebola only a year ago. Is it so difficult to tell your people not to eat monkeys and bats? These are solvable problems, and looking at Trump and thinking that he is the problem here is... kindergarten-ish.
The original rationale for aid activities was to promote global stability, strategic interest, economic benefits, and humanitarian relief.
You can argue that those things things are no longer necessary. But you also need to bear the consequences of losing those benefits.
This is a country with hundreds of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, that should not exist as a cohesive entity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...). The three decades it existed without a civil war, it was under the autocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, under whose regime corruption and extrajudicial killings were rampant, as is typical with any autocratic regime. Following which, the army took control, which led to civil war and even more corruption and extrajudicial killing, which continues till today. This country is a money pit, something the Soviets learnt during the Cold War, and the Chinese today, and any initiative to uplift this country is going to end up in a blackhole. After all, how the heck is anyone supposed to establish anything longlasting in Africa's own backyard bullpen?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...
This country is Panem Manifest.
This reminds me of some early human remains they found in a cave Georgia (the country). It looked like one human lost teeth and in those times that would basically mean death by starvation. But the evidence suggests someone chewed the food for this person and they survived longer.
We thrive as humans because we look out for each other even when it seems irrelevant.
Africa is a mishmash of extremely poorly drawn borders, decided on the whims of arrogant aristocrats in hall rooms in Europe, without paying any attention to the inherent tribal cultures that were present in Africa - and the DRC is the most evident example of this. That's why you have a tiny country like Rwanda being able to support a significant rebellion in Eastern DRC, why DRC has more than 700 communities, with no community making even 10% of the population, why the government is unable to create any form of integration within the country. Like on what basis can the government unite the people together? "We all suffered under Leopold II of Belgium together"??
It's so small, lots of smaller cities could fit that in their budget without a second thought. The list of individuals to which that is an inconsequential amount of money is thousands strong.
Chump change to prevent something that could develop into a global threat to health and trade? What a steal.
Helping these folks should be something we want to do as humans, not as part of our political cycle, or something our government forces us to do, IMO.
Has any critical commenter here contributed funds to this new ebola outbreak? Or do you just want to mandate that other people donate?
How do you choose to help?
It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the decisions we’ve made about the kind of world we choose to live in.
Think about other problems like hunger or health care in the United States. These are problems we have created for ourselves! We could choose to fix them and instead choose not to.
They’re still solvable but we simply do not value solving them.
There's more than enough resources to provide every single person a reasonable existence; We just don't think the homeless, for instance, should be freely helped to get housing. Nah, can't have that, how else can we point to "those" people as examples of the kind of life not conforming gets you?
We'd rather millions go to bed hungry instead of not propping up national markets by destroying food and providing subsidies.
Instead, we house a tiny few in nice apartments in high COL cities.
A million here, a million there, after awhile it starts to add up.
Fill in any situation where someone is in need, one has the ability to help with little inconvenience, but one choose not to because other people aren’t helping.
...
I'm sure the economic suicide will have its victims, and who knows how many have died in detention facilities, but it would be damn-near impossible to match up the the loss of human life seen in poor countries without access to the basic supplies and medical care that USAID delivered.
And how is America's reputation for decency doing these days, a mere year into cutting some of this funding?
> It's easy to demand that other people be generous with their resources.
This is a reference to the Bible, a sentence that Jesus delivered.
What we have instead is that taxes are collected by an entity with the monopoly on violence (and of course, it's understood that the people making more than you are not paying their "fair share") whether you like it or not, spent by people who generally have boundless disdain for the very people who pay those taxes, on people and causes on the other side of the planet. There's no connection between people, or between people and God, in this scenario.
Why not read the verse and see that this refers to collections of people? The source material is readily available, no reason to speculate.
Again, the onus is on the individual to act kindly. If anything, handing that duty off to a third party is a reduction of morals. You are also speculating if you claim that there is a moral equivalence between the two.
--
https://biblehub.com/nkjv/matthew/25.htm
31“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the [c]holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.
[...]
41“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
44“Then they also will answer [d]Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ 45Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
> The US is not responsible for fixing every world issue. Just because they've helped in the past doesn't make them morally responsible for every current and future crisis.
Your answer doesn't quite respond to the GP but instead feels like an expression of political opinion.
From a moral stance, the action of stopping something seems quite distinct from a position in which the thing had never occurred.
If you're talking about ICE, it's officially 15 so far this year. [0]
While this outbreak is bad for DR Congo, I wonder whether they will be able to contain it within their borders without adequate support.
[0] https://www.borderreport.com/hot-topics/border-report-live/b...
I think these can't possible be commensurate - just consider how many more HIV cases there will be without US funding for overseas HIV prevention.
Please understand I’m not saying I’m right about this but just that the vast number of people impacted by the admin’s policies re domestic health care makes me think it could be greater than USAID.
edit: grammar and spelling
HIV deaths are a lagging indicator, so any effect of today's policy will be delayed - as a general matter. But HIV in newborns will lead to death within a year if untreated, and adults with untreated HIV/AIDS will die from other communicable disease sooner than if they were treated.
Since US hospitals public obligation in the US to treat people who are gravely ill, we're 'only' going to see a marked increase in deaths attributable to chronic disease, and I don't think the Medicaid cuts will survive in their current state.
But it's true I don't have numbers on this and won't have a chance to get them this morning. Please share if you have a sense of comparative DALY/QALYs lost through USAID funding cuts vs Medicaid changes.
It will be impossible to effectively quantify the impacts on mortality of the medicaid/medicare/aca changes, but they are (if implemented) going to impact great numbers of people and their health. USAID absolutely the same as you're pointing out and those impacts will be much more measurable. You're going to have about as good a linear test as you can get given how abruptly that funding will disappear (abrupt in contrast to the long, drawn out medicaid/medicare/aca changes (though the initial aca changes, assuming they do happen, will likely be the most abrupt of the three domestic programs because they will happen cleanly on January 1, 2026)).
In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion. Like someone complaining that they can't afford to live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn anymore because their trust fund got cut off; in the long run, it's better to base expectations around reality.
The unspoken mission of USAID and the CDC is to deal with these issues "over there" before they get "here."
Think all these HIV drugs now on the market were tested on American or Europeans?
Why are so many people blind to the idea that the name and stated purpose of an organization can and many times do differ from the actual real-world outcomes that organization produces?
I don't remember this because it did not happen.
However, I do recall our own (Trump-run) CDC putting out ineffective testing materials, while the (admittedly Trump-supported) WHO made the testing resources the whole world, including the US, relied on in the first months of the pandemic.
There was a whole-of-government approach to silencing factually true statements about the pandemic because it either made officials look bad or Trump look good. There was a whole Supreme Court case around this that was sidestepped on grounds of standing, not on the facts of the case.
Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
> Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
These are very peculiar claims that I, despite very close following of factual news sources, have not seen.
What are your sources for these claims?
First, what you propose may work only if happenings in other countries don't affect the US, which I very much doubt.
Second, in most of these countries, it is actually the drip-feed of supposed western "help" that props up corruption and prevents any real change. The "aid" is a form of control, not actual help.
If western nations wanted to actually help, they would support the Grand Inga dam project [1] to actually lift people out of poverty. Instead, they oppose it on environmental grounds, never mind that their industrialization was built on the back of massive pollution.
> Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.
We weren't asked about the abrupt change. I am sure that the average taxpayer supports maintaining lives overseas at minimal costs. She also probably wants pandemics not to infect her children on US shores.
> In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion.
On a geopolitical sense, this is absurd. Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
The article claims 57 cases and 35 deaths. Globally, Ebola killed 15k people over the past 50 years[0]. In the last big outbreak in the DR Congo, it infected less than 4k people in a country of roughly 100 million.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.
> We weren't asked about the abrupt change.
There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo. It's really not like they were hiding their intentions. Broadly speaking, the electorate wanted to take a wrecking ball to what they saw as Washington excess, whether that characterization is fair or not.
> Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
You compared a sovereign nation to an apartment, sorry I was unclear.
> There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo.
There's good polling about this sort of thing - Americans don't want to cause the death of other people. You may construe the electioneering to mean otherwise, but I was not alluding to this.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-...
> Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
I disagree, because allowing infectious disease to fester slowly allows the development of antibiotic resistance and magnification of problems that could otherwise be contained.
In a sense, we're all closer to infections in the developing world than we recognize - despite the US efforts to dismantle the system that has surveilled these infections up to now.
A sovereign nation in name only, who cannot adequately protect its people against disease without Uncle Sam's backstop.
> Americans don't want to cause the death of other people
Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?
I can say that, having promised to deliver medication to someone, a capricious cut in medication supply will be causative in whatever change may result. And that is exactly the setting in which this poll was conducted.
The rich wants more tax breaks so they can gobble up more money and own more assets at US citizens expense.
How’s that sound?
The article says they're looking for $25M or so. If any cases make it to the US, that much money will only cover a small number of patients. In 2014, $1M covered two patients. [1] Much better to spend the money on containment overseas than not spend it overseas and have (more) cases arrive here. It's also much better for the country where the outbreak is occuring. If said country could manage the response on its own, that would be great, but outside help in outbreaks is a good thing anyway --- there's valuable exchange of information between doctors and nurses from different areas in addition to filling the need for additional capacity for care.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cost-...
Another fact is that the money saved went to fund a (small) portion of the big beautiful bill, which doesn't exactly focus on helping the average american Joe.