r/HermanCainAward

An American humanitarian group operating in the part of Africa affected by an Ebola outbreak said Tuesday that Trump administration cuts were “contributing to the rapid escalation” of the epidemic.

The International Rescue Committee said that after the funding cuts in March 2025, it was forced to reduce its health and preparedness work from five to just two sections in Ituri Province in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” said Heather Reoch Kerr, the rescue committee’s Congo country director. “The sharp rise in reported cases over the last few days reflects the reality that surveillance systems are now catching up with transmission that has likely been occurring for some time.”

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday at a meeting of health officials and diplomats at WHO headquarters in Geneva that he, too, was alarmed by the “scale and speed” of this Ebola outbreak, though he has not blamed the U.S. for it.

The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but announced Tuesday that it will fund the establishment of up to 50 treatment clinics and associated frontline efforts to treat Ebola in the Congo and Uganda. “Clinics will provide emergency Ebola screening, triage, and isolation capacity,” the department said in a statement.

“This additional funding announcement, in the first days of the epidemic, should send a clear message: the United States has an ironclad commitment to ensuring this response is fully resourced, rapid, and cooperative between key global health and humanitarian partners,” the State Department added. This funding will be provided mainly through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it said.

President Donald Trump pulled out of the WHO in January. He stopped paying the U.S.’s dues, which made up about 20 percent of the U.N. body’s annual budget, as of January 2025, before the U.S. withdrawal became effective. Trump said he was doing so partly because the WHO bungled the global response to Covid-19, an accusation the health body has rejected.

The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak “an international public health emergency” over the weekend.

The number of people suspected to have died from the disease jumped 30 percent in a day, from 100 to 130, and there are now more than 500 suspected cases, Tedros said. So far, 30 cases have been confirmed through testing in the DRC.

A rare strain of Ebola — Bundibugyo — for which there are no vaccines or treatments, sparked the outbreak. There have been more than 30 Ebola outbreaks in Africa since the deadly hemorrhagic fever was discovered in the 1970s, but only two previous ones involved Bundibugyo. The current one is already deadlier than those two, though far behind the death toll of more than 11,000 caused by the virus’ Zaire strain from 2014 to 2016 in west Africa.

The WHO said that the previous two outbreaks of Bundibugyo killed between 30 and 50 percent of the people who became infected — fewer than the Sudan and Zaire strains.

Early tests looked for infections with one of those strains and as a result, overlooked Bundibugyo, according to Matthew Kavanagh, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.

But the U.S. funding cuts have also played a role, Kavanagh said in a statement. “When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline [U.S. Agency for International Development] programs, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early,” he said.

Before 2025, the U.S. funded health and outbreak preparedness activities carried out by the International Rescue Committee in the eastern DRC, the group said in a statement. “This included waste management areas, triage zones, handwashing stations, showers, and latrines critical to safely managing infectious disease outbreaks,” the IRC said.

Kerr said the transmission of the Ebola virus in the current outbreak may be significantly higher than currently known and that the number of cases is expected to rise over the next few weeks. Cases have already emerged in major regional cities, and the outbreak’s epicenter is in a hard-to-reach, transient mining area where rebels are fighting, which could make virus containment more challenging.

Many health facilities in the area lack adequate protective equipment, the capacity to monitor the virus’ spread or the support needed to respond because of “years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts,” Kerr said in the IRC statement.

The group has started distributing protective equipment in the DRC and supports Uganda’s health ministry response, including screening people crossing the two countries’ borders. Uganda sits directly to the east and has reported two cases, including one death in its capital city of Kampala.

The State Department in a Monday statement outlined other measures it’s taken to respond to the outbreak.

The department said it had set up an interagency coordination cell and an incident management system in Washington within 24 hours of learning about the confirmed Ebola cases and that it convenes a daily meeting of leaders to prioritize the response.

“We are also working closely with [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the U.S. military on potential repatriation of affected Americans, based on assessed exposure and health needs,” the department said in a statement.

A U.S. doctor who tested positive for the virus has been evacuated from the country to Germany’s Berlin Charité hospital.

An American exposed to the deadly hantavirus while on a cruise from Argentina said on Monday that she is not being allowed to leave a federal quarantine unit in Nebraska.

Angela Perryman, 47, received a federal quarantine order, a copy of which she provided to The New York Times, on Monday, after making plans to self-isolate in Florida. It requires her to stay at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha until the end of May.

Ms. Perryman said she has been tested once for the hantavirus, and the results were negative. She is not experiencing symptoms, she said, although she did have brief conversations on the ship with a passenger who later died from the illness.

It was not immediately clear why Ms. Perryman was being required to stay, though federal law authorizes health officials to impose quarantines to prevent the spread of disease. Representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Nebraska Quarantine Unit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Federal health officials have previously said that the 18 American passengers from the cruise ship would need to be screened and monitored at the quarantine unit for several days. Officials had suggested that passengers might not be required to stay for the virus’s full 42-day incubation period.

“At some point, they may be able leave their medical centers to continue quarantines at home, depending on how they are doing,” Captain Brendan Jackson, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, said in a news conference last week after the passengers arrived in Omaha and Atlanta.

He said that each would have an “individualized decision plan.”

Ms. Perryman said she and the 17 other passengers were told during a video conference call with federal officials on Sunday that if they did not remain at the unit voluntarily, they would receive a mandatory quarantine order keeping them there.

Her order came on Monday, authorized by Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Citing federal public health law, it requires her to remain in the Nebraska facility for 21 days after her arrival, a period that expires on May 31.

That three-week period is when the risk of becoming symptomatic from the hantavirus is the highest.

The National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha is the only federally funded facility of its kind. Two passengers from the ship were originally sent to a facility in Atlanta, but have since been moved to Omaha.

Read the Wiki for posting rules. Many posts are removed because OP didn't read the rules.

Notes from the mods:

• Why is it called the Herman Cain Award?
• History of HCA Retrospective: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
• HCA has raised over $65,000 to buy vaccines for countries that cannot afford them.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said little publicly about vaccines in recent months, at the behest of a White House worried that his unpopular stance will hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections. But he has not abandoned his quest for evidence that they are unsafe.

Working behind the scenes, Mr. Kennedy is spearheading an intense push, across health agencies under his purview, for government scientists and federal data contractors to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.

They said the wide-ranging inquiry is a top priority for Mr. Kennedy, who sees vaccines as a “potential culprit” in various neurological and autoimmune disorders, including asthma and allergies. It resurrects research into a number of ideas Mr. Kennedy has espoused, including whether vaccines are linked to autism and whether thimerosal, a preservative that has largely been removed from vaccines in the United States but remains in some flu shots, is dangerous.

The effort is being led by Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and vaccine safety expert who rose in prominence during the pandemic as a critic of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, and is now the health department’s chief science and data officer.

Career scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are conducting the research alongside contractors who provide statistical expertise and access to millions of patient medical records. The initiative was described to The New York Times by six people who are close to it, all of whom insisted on anonymity because it is not public.

The work is raising alarms among some vaccine scholars and critics of Mr. Kennedy, who have long accused the secretary of cherry-picking data and misinterpreting studies to claim that vaccines are unsafe and to limit their use. They fear Mr. Kennedy will use the findings to further erode confidence in vaccines, which the World Health Organization estimates saved 154 million lives over the past half-century.

Mr. Kennedy, who came into office saying he would do nothing to discourage people from getting vaccinated, has already taken steps to scale back the number of vaccines children receive. Public health experts complain that by spending money on issues that have already been thoroughly studied, he is taking funds away from research that might answer the very questions he is asking, including what causes autism.

“It just demonstrates that no matter what the general tone is about vaccines, whether we talk about them or not, the secretary is going to continue to try and look at the data and analyze it in a way that will help support the conclusions that he’s already made,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who oversaw vaccine safety at the C.D.C. until he resigned in August. “And that, to me, is a real problem.”

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, said in a statement that the effort reflected President Trump’s dedication to advancing “gold-standard vaccine research” that will enable policymakers to “better understand vaccine safety and efficacy and to assess how vaccine exposure, timing and patterns affect health across the life span.”

Mr. Nixon said the work would “inform vaccine recommendations, address critical gaps identified by scientific and medical organizations, including the Institute of Medicine, and strengthen public trust in public health.”

He said the initiative also involved the National Institutes of Health and universities. It remains unclear what the effort will cost and whether it is supplanting other routine government vaccine surveillance.

A former plaintiff’s lawyer, Mr. Kennedy has long said that he wants to build a body of scientific evidence on the harms of vaccines and environmental exposures, which he believes are behind an epidemic of chronic disease. That evidence, he has said, will lay the groundwork for legal action.

“That’s how you really change policy,” Mr. Kennedy said in a podcast as a presidential candidate in 2024. He added, “I’m going to provide that enough science, sufficient science, on each one of these exposures and each one of these injuries, to show who’s causing what and hold them responsible in court.”

During a daylong meeting on the new vaccine research initiative in late February, officials from the Health Department and the C.D.C. gathered to discuss specific studies and methods, including a look at the overall effect of the childhood vaccine schedule. Representatives from major health systems such as Kaiser Permanente were also at the table, given their role in allowing the C.D.C. access to vast troves of data through its Vaccine Safety Datalink system.

As part of the new effort, Mr. Kennedy has tasked some government scientists with studying the health status of vaccinated children compared with those who were not vaccinated. Mr. Kennedy coauthored a book, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” calling for such studies, which he believes will prove harm from vaccines.

Researchers say that such comparison studies would be riddled with pitfalls. Vaccinated children are more likely to receive medical care than those who are unvaccinated, and are thus more likely to receive additional medical diagnoses that could be wrongly attributed to vaccines.

Mr. Kennedy is also asking for the group to undertake new studies looking at the link between vaccines and autism.

The project is also looking at the question of harm from thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine preservative, according to people close to the effort. The preservative has been thoroughly studied and found to be unrelated to autism, but Mr. Kennedy has remained concerned about it, and has rescinded federal recommendations for flu vaccines that contain thimerosal.

Through the C.D.C. alone, the cost of the project is estimated at $40 million to $50 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The project is being overseen by Mr. Kennedy and Stefanie Spear, his closest adviser. Mr. Kennedy’s new senior counselor for public health, Dr. Sara Brenner, a veteran of the F.D.A. who has voiced skepticism of vaccines, is expected to propel the studies forward in her new role, according to people familiar with the plan.

The new vaccine initiative is not the first time the secretary has waged a behind-the-scenes effort to study vaccine safety. Last year, Mr. Kennedy faced significant pushback within federal agencies and from Congress when he deployed David Geier, whose vaccine research is considered deeply flawed, to dig into vaccine safety data to explore some of the secretary’s longstanding concerns.

Mr. Kennedy’s team put pressure on C.D.C. officials, including Dr. Jernigan, who delayed Mr. Geier. When Mr. Kennedy ousted Susan Monarez, the agency’s director, Dr. Jernigan and other C.D.C. leaders quit.

Within the C.D.C. and F.D.A., scientists have registered some relief that Dr. Kulldorff, a pioneer in methods to examine vaccine safety, is leading the new inquiry. He worked on research that was groundbreaking in 2009 to monitor the safety of the H1N1 flu vaccine as it was being rolled out. The team he worked with found a slightly elevated rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition associated with some vaccines.

“Martin had been known for decades as a top-notch vaccine safety scientist,” said Daniel Salmon, a Johns Hopkins University vaccine researcher who worked with Dr. Kulldorff on a vaccine data system that predated one the F.D.A. now uses.

Some scientists who worked with Dr. Kulldorff in the past, though, wonder if the evenhanded biostatistician they once knew changed during the pandemic. They point to a federal document, coauthored by Dr. Kulldorff, justifying sharp limitations on vaccines recommended to children in the United States, saying it left out reams of studies supporting flu and hepatitis B vaccines for infants and children.

In 2024, Dr. Kulldorff joined Mr. Kennedy in litigation against Merck, the makers of Gardasil, a vaccine for the human papilloma virus, earning $400 per hour as an expert witness, court records show. Merck, the vaccine’s maker, challenged Dr. Kulldorff’s standing as an expert based on his prior research finding that the vaccine was safe.

The C.D.C. and the F.D.A. already devote considerable effort to investigating vaccine safety, using a number of databases and research methods. But Mr. Kennedy’s fellow vaccine critics, including Retsef Levi, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who serves on Mr. Kennedy’s handpicked a panel of C.D.C. vaccine advisers, find fault with the current studies.

“Many of them have serious methodological flaws,” Dr. Levi said.

Mr. Kennedy began raising questions about vaccines’ safety about 20 years ago, and became a champion for mothers of children with autism who blamed the condition on vaccines. People familiar with his thinking say he still feels deeply committed to those women, and cannot reconcile their often heartbreaking stories with the vast body of research that discounts a link.

For parents who believe vaccines have harmed their children, Mr. Kennedy is fulfilling a major promise. Katie Wright, whose 24-year-old son has autism and got to know Mr. Kennedy through her advocacy for parents who question the safety of vaccines, said more research is necessary to restore trust in childhood immunization.

“There’s been tremendous pushback; they say, ‘Well, the research has been done.’ ” Ms. Wright said. “Well, you know what? A lot of families are concerned. I don’t understand the fear of delving deeper into safety research.”

As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy has demonstrated an unorthodox view of what makes for reliable findings about vaccines. He dismissed a major vaccine study of 1.2 million Danish children over 24 years as “a deceitful propaganda stunt,” for failing to highlight a subset of about 50 children who were more likely to have gotten Asperger’s syndrome, a diagnosis previously applied to high-functioning people with autism, after getting vaccines.

In the language of vaccine science, such findings are considered a signal to be examined in more depth. Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University expert in vaccinology, said she was concerned that selective attention to such signals could be “used to further erode the confidence that people have in vaccines.”

Mr. Kennedy has also made hasty changes to vaccine policy, often with minimal scientific justification for decision making. Among those pivots was an overhaul in January of vaccine recommendations, reducing the number of immunizations for American children to 10 from 17.

Though the plan was held up in court, Dr. Edwards said it portends a scenario where the findings of the current effort get a big splash in the media or drive new policies before scientists can understand the reasoning.

“What they’ve done is also worrisome,” she said, “because there have been so many things that haven’t been open and transparent.”

Read the Wiki for posting rules. Many posts are removed because OP didn't read the rules.

Notes from the mods:

• Why is it called the Herman Cain Award?
• History of HCA Retrospective: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
• HCA has raised over $65,000 to buy vaccines for countries that cannot afford them.