A clip of Elon Musk admitting his DOGE initiative had accidentally cancelled Ebola prevention efforts has resurfaced online amid an outbreak of the virus in Africa.
In the video, from February last year, Musk tells Donald Trump’s cabinet that his government efficiency department’s reckless and sweeping cuts had seen Ebola prevention programmes accidentally scrapped.
He told Trump’s cabinet last year: “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly. For example, with USAID one of the things we accidentally cancelled, very briefly, was Ebola prevention.”
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Laughing about the mistake, the Tesla CEO continued: “I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”
Former USAID officials told the Washington Post and NPR last year that this was not the case and that Ebola programmes were not fully restored.
This was as Musk gutted USAID, which was America’s agency for international development and provided millions in humanitarian aid across the world.
Musk decided to effectively shutter the agency because it was, in his eyes, unnecessary spending.
The clip has been reshared online in recent days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo an international emergency.
As of Tuesday, there more than 513 suspected cases of the virus in DR Congo and 131 deaths linked to the outbreak. ,
A WHO representative has warned it could be spreading faster than originally thought, and that there could be more than 1,000 cases already.
Along with shuttering USAID, Trump has also withdrawn the US from the WHO since returning to power and cut funding to the CDC, the leading public health agency in America.
Whilst it’s difficult to measure how much this has directly contributed to the Ebola outbreak, there’s no denying the US would have been central in efforts to combat the current outbreak before these decisions by Trump.
This was pointed out by Sky News’s Mark Stone on the Trump 100 podcast.
He said: “It’s absolutely clear that USAID would have been at the centre of attempts to limit the spread of Ebola, and would have been doing what they can to educate the population, to get aid into the right areas.
“All of that was at the heart of what USAID did and of course now it is no longer.”
Non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam and Human Rights Watch have said Trump’s aid cuts have compounded crises such as the one in DR Congo.
It has already been estimated that the shuttering of USAID will lead to some 23 million children losing access to education and as many as 93 million people losing access to basic healthcare.
This could lead to more than 3 million preventable deaths per year.