Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed fingers at the World Health Organization on Tuesday, saying the agency was slow to sound the alarm on a deadly Ebola outbreak spreading through the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. "The lead is obviously going to be CDC and the World Health Organization, which was a little late to identify this thing unfortunately," Rubio told reporters.
The criticism comes as the Trump administration has already begun dismantling America's public health infrastructure. The US withdrew from the WHO earlier in Trump's second term, a move that cost the organization roughly 2,000 jobs and nearly a quarter of its total workforce of about 9,400. The departure followed Trump's decision to leave the organization in one of his first acts upon returning to office.
The Ebola outbreak has killed an estimated 131 people in the DRC. Rubio said the US committed about $13 million in assistance despite sweeping aid cuts imposed last year and plans to establish roughly 50 clinics to treat patients in the outbreak region. "It's a little tough to get to because it's in a rural area and a hard-to-get-to place in a war-torn country, unfortunately," he said. "We're going to lean into that pretty heavy."
Public health experts pushed back hard against Rubio's criticism. Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said blaming the WHO ignores the broader crisis. "Blaming the WHO is misplaced, because they are operating with limited resources in a difficult setting with many security challenges," she said. "But it's also cold comfort for all the people who have gotten Ebola and died."
Gronvall raised a more troubling concern: the US itself is now vulnerable. "It's highly worrisome given that public health resources in the US have been slashed and even a couple of cases in the US would be challenging with our current workforce," she said. She called the dismantling of domestic health capacity a strategic blunder that has left America worse prepared for infectious disease threats than at the start of Covid-19.
The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday, warning that neighboring countries face high risk of further spread due to population movement and trade. The organization cautioned against travel bans and border closures, arguing such measures are often driven by fear rather than epidemiology and can backfire by pushing people through unmonitored routes.
The health cuts are intensifying across the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services announced plans this week to eliminate dozens of positions at agencies including the CDC, National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The layoffs follow Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s pledge last year to trim the department's 82,000-person workforce by 10,000 jobs.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiology professor and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown School of Public Health, said the US is now playing catch-up rather than leading the response. The CDC first learned of the outbreak through public confirmation, despite rumors circulating for weeks. Historically, the US government has taken a proactive role in monitoring and containing rumored outbreaks in places like the DRC. "It feels like the US government is on the sidelines this time," Nuzzo said.
Author James Rodriguez: "Rubio's jab at the WHO rings hollow when American public health is collapsing under self-imposed cuts."
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