Hey, hey, Donald J, how many kids have you killed today?
Well, probably a bunch in Africa, where his wrecking of USAID helped the latest Ebola outbreak spread undetected for months:
There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak “might have been going on for a few months”, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.
…US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026.
…“When those USAID stop-work orders came out, there was a whole series of people who were actively looking for spillover in the DRC and in Uganda,” [Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University] said. “There were hundreds of health workers doing surveillance activities, and then, of course, you had the bigger picture, which is the thousands of health workers who were doing HIV, TB, malaria, maternal and child health – all of these things funded through US funding from USAID and also some from CDC to be doing global health activities – who were the frontlines of detection.”
Patients don’t usually come to the clinic suspecting they have Ebola, he pointed out; they usually come in with a fever or other symptoms, and “those frontline community health workers … are always the ones that detect outbreaks early”.
…In the past, the US had ensured that “many, many potential global outbreaks didn’t become global”, but now it’s stepping back, Kavanagh said, adding: “This outbreak should have been detected weeks ago, and exactly how and why will be figured out as we go, but it certainly says that the United States has stopped playing the role” [Melody Schreiber, “US Is ‘Simply Choosing Not to Stop’ Ebola Outbreak After Massive Public Health Cuts, Experts Say,” The Guardian, 2026.05.21].
We probably don’t have to worry about Ebola reaching South Dakota, but the remoteness of this outbreak doesn’t excuse America’s retreat from its proven ability to prevent deaths and ameliorate suffering.