'We will make mistakes': Elon Musk says DOGE accidentally cancelled Ebola prevention, restored it
Tech billionaire Elon Musk said that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) accidentally cancelled Ebola prevention but then quickly restored it. Musk’s comments that come amid a raging controversy on USAID funding and job cuts said that they will make mistakes and won't be perfect.
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"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. We restored the Ebola prevention immediately, there was no interruption. But, we do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in the financial year 2026. This requires saving $4 billion per day, everyday from now through the end of September," he said.
Donald Trump, who introduced Elon Musk as a "tremendously successful guy" who is working really hard with DOGE, said, “He’s sacrificing a lot. He’s getting a lot of praise, I’ll tell you, but he’s also getting hit.”
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Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts raise doubts
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So is Musk accurate in his description of "accidentally" canceling and then restoring America's "Ebola prevention" efforts?
Public health experts say his comments were partly right: U.S. efforts were indeed interrupted.
But he got some facts wrong, they say: U.S. support has not been fully restored.
"I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. He says he's in regular contact with officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who work on Ebola as well as physicians on the ground in Uganda, where an outbreak was declared on January 30, with nine confirmed cases and one death — of a nurse — so far.
As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.
… Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola.
"Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says
Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak. He is now the president of Refugees International.
Konyndyk used to lead what was called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID, which deployed on the ground in disasters like Ebola.
"The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists. All of those people are gone. The operation centers that they worked out of are shut down. They can't even access the Ronald Reagan Building where those operation centers sit. That lease has been handed over to Customs and Border Protection," he says.
He called Musk's reassurance that things have been restored "total garbage." …”
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