Musk’s Reckless Ebola Cuts Could Lead to Deadly Pandemics

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Last week, standing in front of President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire running a blitzkrieg against the US government, acknowledged that he had made a mistake—that in going after the US Agency for International Development, the foreign assistance program that he has all but destroyed, he accidentally ended the Ebola prevention project it ran overseas. Musk claimed the error was quickly fixed and there was no interruption in service. But former and current USAID staff quickly told the Washington Post that Musk was wrong—the Ebola response remained sharply curtailed. And, as the Bulwark reported, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was placed on administrative leave Sunday, had drafted an unfinished memo that predicted the demolition of USAID would lead to more than 28,000 cases of Ebola and related diseases, as well as a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally, up to 18 million cases of malaria (with up to 166,000 deaths annually), and an additional 200,000 cases of paralytic polio a year.

Musk’s assertion that his slash-and-burn assault on USAID had no negative impact on combating Ebola was disinformation. He was hiding the truth on a critical global health issue. Mother Jones' David Corn spoke about Musk’s claim with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. He ran the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID during the Obama years and returned to the agency to work on Covid during the Biden administration. David asked him to describe how dangerous the cuts are. Have Trump and Musk seriously undermined the nation’s ability to prevent a major pandemic from hitting the United States?

You can read the full conversation here

#elonmusk #usaid #ebolavirus

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