CDC urgent – The CDC has issued an urgent request to help screen for Ebola at U.S. airports, days after restrictions on travel from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. The outbreak—already ranked the third largest in history by experts—has also be
For the third straight day, the pressure is still on the front edge of the response: screening at U.S. airports.
On Wednesday, the CDC sent an “urgent request” to its workers to help screen for Ebola at U.S. airports. The call landed shortly after the agency restricted travel from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and South Sudan earlier in the month as the outbreak worsened.
So far, the Ebola crisis has moved beyond the stage of tracking a handful of cases. More than 1,000 cases have been reported, including 223 deaths. Yet the numbers also carry uncertainty: only about 125 confirmed cases and 17 confirmed deaths have been verified. a gap experts attribute to conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo interfering with accurate data collection.
Ebola’s lethality is part of why every step matters. On average, the disease is about 50% fatal. And for this specific strain—the Bundibugyo virus—there is no cure or vaccine.
The airport screening request is now unfolding against a different timeline: the Trump administration’s pullback from public health investments, both at home and abroad, according to experts who say those erosions are rippling internationally—and then returning as a national problem.
In the opening years of his second term. President Donald Trump. with the assistance of billionaire Elon Musk. disassembled the United States Agency for International Development. an agency that once spearheaded international responses to previous Ebola outbreaks. The argument from public health researchers is not abstract. It is about who arrives early. who builds surveillance. and whether systems can move fast enough when the virus outruns the paperwork.
Dr. Craig Spencer. a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health and a survivor of Ebola. described the current response as dramatically different from the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda in 2024. a comparison he said showed what speed can look like when the infrastructure is in place. Spencer said a friend on the ground called him right before the 2024 Marburg outbreak was officially reported. He then reached global health contacts in the U.S. government, including people tied to the global health team at the White House.
Spencer said he was talking to them within an hour, and within eight days investigational treatments and vaccines were on the ground—an effort he said was facilitated by the U.S., the White House and USAID.
He credits that rapid mobilization with containment and an interruption of transmission. Spencer said Rwanda ended up ending that outbreak with one of the lowest death rates recorded for an Ebola or Marburg response ever.
In Spencer’s telling, the contrast is stark. He compared the 2024 Marburg response to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda in early 2025. where. he said. there was no U.S. response. Other global health organizations helped stem spread, but Spencer argued the lack of U.S. intervention left the outbreak worse than it otherwise might have been.
He then pointed to the current Ebola outbreak’s trajectory: it has already far surpassed the 2025 Uganda outbreak, which he said saw fewer than 100 confirmed cases. By his account, the 2026 outbreak is nearing 1,000 confirmed cases.
Legal and medical scholar Matthew Herder, a professor of law and Medicine at Shulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, said the current outbreak is likely worse because of the lack of U.S. support in the region—and that future outbreaks could be difficult to contain as well.
Herder focused on what the U.S. has historically paid for before a crisis hits. He said the National Institutes of Health was previously and for decades the biggest funder of biomedical research against infectious diseases and other threats to public health globally. In his view, cutting those programs undercuts the biggest funder of preparedness.
He said the U.S. has not only helped in emergency response, but also helped set up surveillance systems to detect threats earlier and trained local workforces to monitor and respond when outbreaks start.
Herder also warned that the consequences of reduced investment may be harder to measure in this Ebola case—but could be more severe in a faster-moving respiratory threat such as COVID-19 or flu. He used H5N1 as an example. The influenza virus has been circulating in wild birds since 2022 in the U.S. and elsewhere, and has since spread to mammals—including bears, house cats, whales and a few humans. In his framing. H5N1 is the kind of transmissible disease that could become a disaster if it begins widely infecting humans while U.S. public health infrastructure is diminished.
That diminished posture, Herder said, is visible not only in funding cuts but in decisions that affect global information sharing.
Early in Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order withdrawing from the World Health Organization—an attempt he had made in his first term as well. Herder said the legal process of leaving the WHO was completed in January 2026.
He described the order’s language as going beyond withdrawing: it is about cessation of sharing information with the WHO. Herder said the world’s greatest hub for tracking influenza—specifically—sits at the CDC in Atlanta. With the information flow redirected. he warned that a virus circulating in livestock. poultry and whales around the United States would be harder to track and coordinate globally.
Herder also pointed to another effect of cuts to public health investments: a cessation of financial support for the development of mRNA vaccines from the government. He said mRNA platforms can be adapted for new vaccines, and that slowing their development and deployment could slow preparedness.
He then argued that the U.S. may remain an economic powerhouse, but that buying power is not the same as being ready. “Right now, the U.S. still remains an incredibly powerful economic actor,” Herder said. In his view, even if a vaccine is developed later, the U.S. may be able to capture doses with purchasing power—but it may not be at the forefront of preparing. surveilling. and ensuring domestic access in time.
A second critique came from Haiyun Damon-Feng, an assistant professor at Cardozo School of Law. Damon-Feng said politicization in agencies such as the CDC further undermines the U.S. ability to respond to public health threats.
She said the CDC is not primarily a regulatory agency. In her description. it has an “epistemic function”—gathering and surveilling data and building analysis—supported by a cadre of public health experts and scientists. She pointed to what she said was “slashing of that infrastructure” early in the administration.
Damon-Feng tied that to cuts to foreign aid programs like USAID, arguing the combination puts the U.S. in a vulnerable position for both domestic and global threats.
But her concern went beyond public health readiness. She said politicized control over what the public is allowed to see could also make it harder to hold officials accountable.
“If we have politicized control over what we believe to be true. or what facts we’re exposed to. or what facts are even allowed to see the light of day. ” Damon-Feng said. “you can think about the kind of censorship that has been reported coming out of various federal agencies. that is going to have a hugely detrimental effect on our ability to hold our elected officials and appointed officials accountable.”.
In the immediate term. the CDC’s urgent request is about the practical mechanics of trying to keep cases from moving undetected through the country. But in the wider frame drawn by these experts—spanning airport screening to the dismantling of USAID. to the completed WHO exit in January 2026—the Ebola outbreak has become more than a foreign emergency.
It has become a measure of what happens when the distance between public health policy and outbreak reality grows shorter and more consequential—starting at airports, and then reaching back into Washington.
Ebola CDC U.S. airports World Health Organization USAID Trump administration National Institutes of Health public health investments H5N1 mRNA vaccines Democratic Republic of the Congo Uganda South Sudan