An expanding outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring nation of Uganda, led the World Health Organization to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” on May 17. The WHO Emergency Committee convened an emergency meeting on this matter in Geneva, Switzerland May 20. The number of suspected Ebola cases has reportedly jumped to 600 people, with a suspected 139 deaths.
The Ebola virus, a single-stranded RNA virus, can target the body’s immune system and impairs how cells clot blood, which triggers severe bleeding along with multi-organ failure. The type that exists in the DRC and Uganda is the Bundibugyo strain. For this variant, the mortality rate is 25 to 50%. The WHO warned that a vaccine for this variant of the virus is in the early stages of development, and is still six to nine months away from being developed.
With no vaccine, in order to stop the virus’s spread, several countries in the area have closed border crossings. However, the Africa CDC has stated that these borders remain porous due to people travelling to work or for business. The WHO has released $500,000 from the agency’s contingency fund, and the Africa CDC is spending $2 million, but these are small amounts that may prove to be inadequate.
Historically, the U.S. has played a very significant role in supporting international programs for surveillance of disease. This is particularly true in the DRC, because it’s somewhat of a hot spot for infectious disease outbreaks. But that was stopped by U.S. President Donald Trump has applied a Malthusian policy—along with Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. Approximately 80% of the funding that went to international disease surveillance, and prevention of infectious diseases was slashed. More than 50% of the HHS’s Centers for Disease Control highest positions are vacant, an estimated 2,000 staff have been fired, and another 300 are on administrative leave. In 2018, during the first Trump administration, the entire U.S. Global Health Security Team was fired.
As Ebola spread, an international finger was pointed at the United States. Over the weekend of May 16-17, the U.S. Department of State hastily mobilized an initial $23 million in bilateral foreign assistance to immediately bolster the DRC’s and Uganda’s supporting surveillance, laboratory capacity, and safe burials programs, while funding up to 50 treatment clinics. But had the Trump-Kennedy team never cut off the original funding, many lives would have been saved.
In a May 7, 1985 article in EIR magazine, “The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown,” physical economist Lyndon LaRouche asserted that when extreme fascist-like austerity is applied during periods of economic breakdown, this causes the “potential relative population-density [to] fall below the level of the existing population.” Under such austerity, an “undernourished population might become a breeding-culture for the eruption of epidemic and pandemic disease.” The economic consequences of the Iran war is accelerating the world economic breakdown, creating the condition in which Ebola may escape the DRC and Uganda, thus spreading to Africa and the world.
