WASHINGTON — The White House declared the Ebola outbreak in central Africa effectively contained Tuesday, hours after confirming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been prohibited from phoning the World Health Organization to ask if anything was wrong.
The announcement came as the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ituri province reported a fast-moving cluster of the Sudan strain, a variant with no approved vaccine. But under protocols installed early this year, a viral outbreak does not officially trouble the United States until a political appointee in Washington decides that it does.
That appointee has not yet been named. The position is vacant. So is the directorship at the CDC. So are the desks of roughly 3,000 agency staffers—laboratory scientists, field epidemiologists, the so-called disease detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service—who departed or were dismissed since Sweet Potato Hitler returned to office and began purging the permanent bureaucracy.
“If you do not look for a thing, you do not find it,” a senior health official explained, speaking on condition of anonymity because the agency’s press office has been folded into a team that primarily distributes blurbs from the president’s social media account. “Zero cases is our baseline, and we are proud to be holding steady.”
The logic is internally consistent. In December, the administration ordered the CDC to cease all routine communication with the WHO. In January, it froze foreign assistance payments that funded early-warning surveillance in precisely the regions where Ebola emerges. In March, it rescinded the rules requiring that disease detectives actually be allowed to detect disease.
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician who contracted Ebola treating patients in 2014 and now runs pandemic response at Brown University, noted Wednesday that the United States is already “weeks behind” an outbreak that has not yet produced an American case. “We need to fully engage our CDC,” he said. “We need to get back on the ground.”
Spencer’s warning was not well received. A White House aide responded that no meeting would be scheduled because “no one here has Ebola” and “panic is a choice.”
The approach has generated quiet praise among allies. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reportedly called the strategy “inspirational.” And domestic reaction was swift. A coalition of House Republicans introduced the Pathogen Is Over When We Say It Is Over Act, which would codify the policy and rename the CDC the Center for Pleasant Statistics.
The DRC health ministry has confirmed 273 cases and 178 deaths since May 15. The State Department did not address those figures. It issued a travel advisory for the region Wednesday, warning Americans to “just not get sick”—the same guidance the administration applied to the CDC.
