ebola
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EDGELORD DARK MAGA CABINET MTG HAHA WE CUT OFF EBOLA AID, NOT PERFECT BUT WE QUICKLY FIXED NO INTERRUPTION; NOT TRUE // RFK2 MEASLES OUTBREAKS KIA NORMAL
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MUSK CUTE CLIP
pbs educ
SUMMARY
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is escalating quickly. There are growing warnings that, without a stronger response, this Ebola outbreak could become one of the deadliest. William Brangham takes a closer look with Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International. In 2014, he ran USAID’s foreign disaster assistance when Ebola broke out in Africa.
View the transcript of the story.
NOTE: If you are short on time, watch the video and complete this See, Think, Wonder activity: What did you notice? What did the story make you think about? What would you want to learn more about?
News alternative*: Check our recent segments from the News Hour, and choose the story you’re most interested in watching. You can make a Google doc copy of discussion questions that work for any of the stories here.
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npr
In March 2025, Nicholas Enrich was the top U.S. official for global health when two major events were happening at the same time: The Trump administration was dismantling USAID, and an Ebola outbreak was spreading in Uganda.
It was Enrich's job to manage the U.S. response. He says he was stymied at every turn.
"I was told by one of the political appointees, who was the head of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, that Ebola is a scam," Enrich says.
A year later, as the worst Ebola outbreak in more than a decade spreads in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Enrich has published a timely book with a title drawn from Elon Musk's plans for the premier U.S. foreign aid agency: Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.*
Simon & Schuster
It's written from the perspective of a civil servant who served at the premier U.S. foreign aid agency under four administrations –- until he was put on leave and then dismissed after leaking memos about plans to dismantle the agency.
In an interview with NPR , Enrich talked about his view of the agency and his perspective on the current Ebola outbreak in a world where USAID no longer exists.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let's start with a controversial question. The administration gave various rationales to justify the sunsetting of USAID –- accusations of political bias, waste, fraud and abuse. Did you agree with any of their points?
Okay, I'm gonna say yes, but before I talk about them, it's important to recognize that the agency was not destroyed because it was wasteful or because it didn't work or because they wanted to realign aid with the American First priorities. It was destroyed by a bunch of people who did not understand what the agency did, who were completely uninformed and unqualified about our programs, and who were there tearing down the agency that they didn't get for the sole purpose of soothing the ego of a billionaire.
That's a very stark explanation.
One of the reasons I wrote this book was to make sure that it's very, very clear why the agency was destroyed and why it wasn't. That said, I think that there are ways that aid could have been more efficient and could have been less likely to foster dependency in ways that it had.
But you know, I also want to make the point that USAID actually was considered one of the most efficient agencies within the government [operating] on less than 1% of the federal budget. We, among many other things, saved the lives of 92 million people over the last 20 years alone, which is a staggering impact for a relatively shoestring budget. So it's not that we weren't efficient, it's just that, of course, there were ways that we could have become more so.
You were put on leave immediately after leaking the memos. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in your final months there?
I do feel like I was quite naive. I was a civil servant for my whole career, and I was no activist or advocate. So it did not come naturally to me to stop and say: "Wait a minute. This is not an opportunity for me to figure out how to administer the policies of this administration. This is completely off the rails and is a violation of laws, of court orders, of congressional intent and it is unethical and causing destruction and harm to public safety." And I wish that I had been able to say earlier, "This is not okay and I cannot continue to work within the bounds of these walls that are collapsing around me to try to save this tiny bit of our program."
I wish I had said I need to not agree to some of the directives, because I did [agree]. I did implement directives from our political leadership that I'm not proud of, like making lists of our staff, knowing that some of those people would be terminated, or taking life-saving activities off the list of what I was asking to be approved.
For example…?
I was told by the political appointees, for example, that they wouldn't be approving any of the Ebola activities, because Ebola was a scam, and so I made a decision that I regret to this day of removing Ebola activities from those that I was hoping to get approved.
You were involved in Ebola efforts even before the Uganda outbreak last year. What was the agency's position on the virus?
I was thrust into the top official of global health role for the agency and my job was to set up a robust U.S. government response to the Ebola outbreak, and I was just stopped at every single turn. It started with the refusal to even allow us to screen passengers at international airports for symptoms of Ebola before they got onto flights that were headed to Europe and potentially onward to the United States.
And we were never able to even get a team into the country. They had banned us from communicating with our sister agencies like the CDC, which made it extremely difficult to manage an Ebola outbreak in the ways that we were used to. For example, in preparation for an outbreak like this one [we] had pre-positioned personal protective equipment in nearby Kenya so that it could be delivered to the outbreak zone within a matter of hours. But we were never able to move that, because the warehouse was owned by the World Health Organization, and our political leadership wouldn't even let us talk to the World Health Organization.
What's going through your mind as you see the news of the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
This is the first Ebola outbreak since USAID has been destroyed. I think about the systems and the expertise and the experience that USAID had in leading and coordinating responses to Ebola outbreaks — the way that we would immediately get our DART [Disaster Assistance Response Team] teams into place to move PPE [personal protective equipment], to coordinate partners in the country, to do contact tracing on a massive scale and community education and safe burial procedures. This is what we need in an outbreak — response with speed — and what instead we have without that expertise and systems from USAID is a State Department that, in the best of light, is rapidly trying to respond but is reinventing the wheel and trying to improvise systems that used to exist.
You were at USAID during the 2014 outbreak of Ebola as well. Were there lessons learned during that response that could have been implemented now with this outbreak if the agency were still around?
Because of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, we completely changed the way that we do infectious disease preparedness and have an entirely new global health security strategy. We invested billions of dollars in that time period to set up what my former boss [Atul Gawande] used to call the global immune system, which allowed for early detection and early response efforts. So we could make sure that our surveillance is in place and our testing is working and our community health workers know what to be looking for –- so we are detecting outbreaks at such an early stage that there's no time for them to spread.
And what has happened to that system?
That entire system was ripped apart in 2025. What we're seeing with Ebola in DRC {Democratic Republic of Congo] and Uganda and the recent hantavirus outbreak, these are a couple of examples within just a few weeks of how far American leadership has fallen in detection and response to infectious disease outbreaks.
It does make me nervous that if there is a pathogen that is more likely to be the next pandemic that we're just way, way underprepared as compared to how we were just a few months ago.
How do you think we should be talking about USAID at this moment?
I think of it as an era that I'm very proud of in American history and extremely proud of myself for getting just the opportunity to be a part of when the official policy of the United States government was to make the world a safer and healthier place. I'm sad that it's gone. I do remain optimistic, however, that we will need to have a new and independent agency that does international development and foreign aid — in the same way that no one would be satisfied folding the State Department into the Department of Defense because they do completely different pillars of foreign policy, so too does international development need a separate and unique kind of organizational structure to provide the third leg of the foreign policy stool.
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oig?!
Ebola Oversight
Advisory Notice for USAID’s Response to the Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2019?! Ann Calvaresi Barr /s/ Inspector General
better ccord: ...agency coordination, initial leadership support, and staffing capacity; and (2) assessing, responding, and adapting to the outbreak in real-time. 3 Accordingly, we made 14 recommendations aimed at improving USAID’s response to future EVD outbreaks and other PHEICs. In a companion report, we made eight recommendations to improve the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance’s (OFDA) decision-making process for funding medical facilities and commodities.4 USAID has been responsive to our recommendations and has closed many, but several recommendations have yet to be fully implemented (see attachment 1). While there are a number of complexities in fully implementing these recommendations, it is imperative that the open recommendations discussed in this advisory be prioritized to enable USAID to improve its outbreak response.
Audit of Select Activities from the USAID/Food for Peace Response to the Ebola Crisis in West Africa
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GGL 6 26
AI Overview
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has historically been the primary U.S. agency responding to global Ebola outbreaks. However, following the restructuring and dismantling of USAID in 2025, U.S. assistance for the escalating Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda is now channeled through the State Department and the CDC. [1, 2]
Background & Operational Shifts
- USAID Restructuring: In early 2025, most of USAID’s independent programs and staffing were either dismantled or absorbed into the State Department. [1]
- Current U.S. Response: The State Department's Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy (GHSD) and the CDC are now tasked with coordinating the U.S. diplomatic and technical response. [1]
- Recent Funding: The State Department has pledged financial support, including mobilizing roughly $23 million through the UN and funding up to 50 clinics. [1]
Impact and Controversy
- Criticism: Former officials and health experts argue that dismantling USAID programs unraveled crucial frontline networks. This loss of established community workers, stockpiled PPE, and local laboratory support allegedly contributed to a delayed initial response. [1, 2, 3]
- Official Stance: The State Department and CDC officials have publicly disputed claims that restructuring hampered the response, stating that the transition to the new State Department bureau made global health efforts "more aligned and effective". [1, 2]
For official, up-to-date surveillance and situational reports on the virus's status, track the CDC Ebola Outbreak Summary.
FFL 6 26
NO LNX
How funding cuts to USAID are impacting the Ebola ...
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2026/05/24 › nx-s1-5830015
May 24, 2026 — NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Dennis Carroll, PhD. about the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda and how ...
How the loss of USAID has weakened the fight against Ebola
PBS
https://www.pbs.org › newshour › show › how-the-loss...
7 days ago — He's the president of Refugees International. But back in 2014, he ran USAID's foreign disaster assistance when Ebola broke out in West Africa.Read more
Ebola Oversight | Office of Inspector General - USAID OIG's
U.S. Agency for International Development (.gov)
https://oig.usaid.gov › taxonomy › term
Search. Search. Ebola Oversight. Advisory Notice for USAID's Response to the Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Read more
NO DAte?
- The U.S. Department of State issued Travel Warnings against non-essential travel to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
- Consular Affairs Fact Sheet for Travelers
- Due to a lack of options for routine health care services, the Department of State ordered the departure of family members residing with Embassy staff in Monrovia and Freetown.
- U.S. Government employees in both countries will remain on active duty at the Embassies, and additional staff members are being deployed to assist the Governments of Liberia and Sierra Leone in addressing the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak.
- Our Embassies remain open and will continue business as usual in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. We remain deeply committed to supporting regional and international efforts to deliver health care as well as contain and control the transmission of the Ebola virus.
- The U.S. Government is monitoring the situation very closely and will update its response and travel recommendations as needed. You can find the latest information at http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/alertswarnings.html.
PBS
How the loss of USAID has weakened the fight against Ebola
1 day ago
The Borgen Project
Cuts to USAID and the Ebola Outbreak in the DRC
3 days ago
The Mirror US
More than 11,000 people could die in Ebola outbreak as expert sounds alarm over USAID cuts
1 day ago
NPR
In his book, self-described USAID 'whistleblower' talks about the agency and Ebola
1 week ago
More news
Dr. Casséus: “The First Outbreak of the Post-USAID Era”
Partners In Health
https://www.pih.org › article › dr-casseus-first-outbreak-...
May 20, 2026 — Dr. Alain Casséus, an infectious disease expert and PIH leader, explains how the dismantling of USAID will impact the 2026 Ebola response.Read more
Response to the Ebola Virus - State.gov
U.S. Department of State (.gov)
https://2009-2017.state.gov › health › ebola
USAID Ebola Page · More stories and images from USAID's fight against Ebola. CDC. Basic Ebola Facts from the CDC. Ebola is not transmitted through the air.Read more
USAID EBOLA from 2009-2017.state.gov
Videos
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Pete Marocco Keeps Trying to Prevent Bill Cassidy from Learning the Truth about USAID
March 3, 2025/by [emptywheel
There’s been an underlying tension throughout the five week DOGE effort to suffocate USAID (and with it, millions of people around the world).
After Trump halted foreign assistance, Republicans spoke up, often quietly; but John Cornyn did so publicly in a hearing, Jerry Moran did so as well (in part to support Kansas Ag markets), and Bill Cassidy did so on Xitter, demanding that lifesaving programs that Republicans have long supported be restarted.
Over and over again, Rubio and others insisted that they had reversed course and restarted life-saving programs.
But both in court filings and anonymous leaks, people who have previously implemented USAID’s work (virtually all have been put on leave or ousted) disputed that the programs had been restarted.
That led to this intemperate comment from Rubio, in which he claimed that if humanitarian programs had not been restarted, it was because their organizations themselves were incompetent.
“Right now, there is no USAID humanitarian assistance happening,” a current USAID official in the humanitarian division said. “There are waivers put in place by Secretary Rubio for emergency food assistance and a number of other sectors, but they are a fraud and a sham and intended to give the illusion of continuity, which is untrue.”
The official also slammed the waiver as unclear and largely unactionable because staff has been furloughed, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seized control of the agency.
“There is no staff left anymore to actually process waiver requests or to move money or to make awards or to do anything,” that official added. “We’ve ceased to exist.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday pushed back on nongovernmental organizations saying aid programs remained paused despite the waiver.
“I issued a blanket waiver that said if this is lifesaving programs, OK — if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” he said. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.
“And I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization, or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” Rubio added.
Since then, USAID has twice silenced people continuing to debunk Rubio’s claim to have restored humanitarian care.
On February 13, USAID released a memo purporting to correct a “false narrative,” “clarifying that Global Health (GH) programming under the lifesaving humanitarian waiver has continued uninterrupted and was never paused” — effectively an order to adhere to the lie that Marco Rubio’s order had actually restored care.
Then, on Friday, USAID retaliated against the truth once again.
After the Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Nicholas Enrich, issued a memo describing that such aide has never been restored, he was placed on paid leave.
The memo itself presents a detailed timeline of the various ways that aide was stalled and identifies a large number of specific documents where he memorialized each step of the process (the NYT, in its story on Enrich’s suspension, describes obtaining “a series of memos,” and I assume about five other outlets did too; it detailed and released a different memo cataloging likely impacts).
It details specific ways DOGE interfered with the release of lifesaving funds by restricting access to the financial systems needed to process waivers.
From the start, the Programs Group alerted Agency leadership that the lack of access to funds for implementing partners was a critical impediment to the ability to implement the waiver, as access to USAID financial systems (GLAAS and Phoenix) had been completely turned off by DOGE, per Bob Kingman and Daniel Gaush from Department of State ICASS Service Center, preventing the flow of any funds to implementing partners who were approved to implement LHA activities.
It describes how Christian nationalist Pete Marocco personally intervened to ensure that the Ebola relief Elon Musk claimed had been restored could not be restored if doing so involved the World Health Organization.
On February 18th, A-AA Enrich shared an action memo with Mark Lloyd recommending the utilization of an existing agreement with the WHO to utilize previously obligated funds to access a critical stockpile of PPE and lab supplies to support the Uganda Ebola outbreak response. While the activities would normally be covered in the regular process for the lifesaving humanitarian assistance waiver, this memo was drafted for approval from State/F Director Pete Marocco, given that the implementing partner of the agreement is WHO, the subject of a separate Executive Order. Mark Lloyd cleared the memo on Feb. 19th and it was sent forward for COS Borkert clearance and DFA Pete Marocco signature. COS Borkert specified that DFA Marocco would not sign the memo and would not agree to utilizing the agreement with WHO to access the PPE stockpile, and instead ordered A-AA Enrich to “pick up the PPE and deliver it to the necessary people and organizations in the region to respond to ongoing infectious disease outbreaks” without utilizing the agreement with WHO. DFA Marocco immediately responded to Borkert’s email, threatening to the jobs of GH staff if an alternate plan was not carried out immediately, directing political appointees Borkert, Lloyd and Meisburger to “take all necessary personnel actions in the event this is not completed in the next 12 hours.”
It continues the explanation of what happened with Ebola: six days later, political appointees specifically deprioritized getting Ebola funding (and that for other “neglected tropical diseases”) restarted.
On February 24, in an effort to move forward approvals and payments, the GH leadership team (A-AA Enrich and DAA Coles) walked through each waiver request with political leadership (Mark Lloyd and Tim Meisburger) in an effort to move forward approvals and payments. Political leadership provided guidance instructing GH to narrow the focus of its requests and to deprioritize activities related to neglected tropical diseases, Mpox, polio, Ebola, and any monitoring and surveillance activities, as those would not be approved.
Then, when State shut down virtually all foreign aide last week, they shut down (inadvertently, they claimed later) Ebola programs along with everything else.
Additionally, on February 26th, over 5,000 USAID awards were terminated globally; GH was not notified of this action before it happened. The terminated awards included almost all of the awards that were needed to implement lifesaving activities. A-AA Enrich informed COS Borkert, SBO Jackson, and AtAs Lloyd and Meisburger immediately of the grave impacts on lifesaving activities related to malaria, tuberculosis, and ebola. In an email following the February 26th terminations, DCOS Borkert indicated that the awards that were terminated should not have been, and had been terminated in error: “Please hold on these life saving programs and let us review in the morning. There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind. We need to identify what those are.” [my emphasis]
The memo even details the genesis of the earlier, February 13 memo:
On February 13th, A-AA Enrich and Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator (SDAA) Julie Wallace were told by DCOS Borkert that there had been a false narrative spread in the media that GH had been told to pause on approving activities under the LHA waiver. A-AA Enrich stated that the Agency FO had in fact told GH to pause on further approvals, and reminded him of the previous day’s email. DCOS Borkert as well as other senior advisors, including AtA Tim Meisburger and Senior FO Advisor Laken Rapier shouted at A-AA Enrich that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to immediately draft another Info Memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause.”
On February 13th, GH circulated the memo from AtA Mark Lloyd “performing the duties of Assistant Administrator, Global Health” which among other things, reiterated GH’s approach to approval of waivers per the earlier February 4th memo.
While agency leadership previously told GH to only include requests for 30 days (articulated in the February 4th memo), GH was subsequently asked to shift to the original 90 days as articulated in the original waiver language. This was updated in the February 13th memo. [my emphasis]
As a whole, it provides this summary of who is responsible for preventing lifesaving programs from being sustained: political leadership and DOGE.
USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation. These actions include the refusal to pay for assistance activities conducted or goods and services rendered, the blockage and restriction of access to USAID’s payment systems followed by the creation of new and ineffective processes for payments, the ever-changing guidance as to what qualifies as “lifesaving” and whose approval is needed in making that decision, and most recently, the sweeping terminations of the most critical implementing mechanisms necessary for providing lifesaving services. These actions individually and in combination have resulted in the U.S. Government’s failure to implement critical lifesaving activities. This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale. This memo serves to document the LHA waiver process and challenges encountered by the Bureau for Global Health to date, excluding PEPFAR.
In other words, Nicholas Enrich documented everything that had happened in spite of Rubio’s public order, and he was ousted.
While it’s not surprising, it’s not entirely clear whether there’s a specific reason he was ousted. That is, it’s not clear to me which facts people like Pete Marocco are trying to suppress:
- The specific actions taken by DOGE to thwart Rubio’s order.
- Marocco’s own specific complicity with decisions that will lead to the deaths of millions.
- The sheer amount of advance warning that political leadership got
- Rubio’s possible lack of involvement in things that Marocco has told courts he was personally involved in, which I wrote up here
But I can’t help but notice that Rubio responded to demands from Republican Senators that life-saving programs be restarted. And State has spent a good deal of time since then trying to hide the ways that people at USAID and State — people like Marocco and DOGE — directly undermined all efforts to do what Rubio assured Republican Senators was being done.
Are they trying to hide that people reporting to Rubio have directly undermined his order, the real insubordination that Marocco has blamed on USAID staffers? Or are they trying to hide that Rubio’s order was always a lie?
Whichever it is, Senators who were placated by Rubio’s past public claims are now on notice. They were lying to you. And while they were lying to you, food and medicine was spoiling and people were dying.
Tags: Jerry Moran, John Cassidy, John Cornyn, Pete Marocco
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interesting to C&C to trump fox covid fustercluck
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-news-coronavirus-coverage-stands-stark-contrast-its-coverage-ebola-2014
the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, cable news outlets -- and Fox News in particular -- fearmongered over an Ebola outbreak in Africa, before suddenly dropping the story after the votes were counted. [SORT OF LIKE CARAVAN?] Fox News figures pushed hard on the idea that President Barack Obama's administration was inept at responding to a potential pandemic.
As America faces a coronavirus pandemic under President Donald Trump, many of those same people are now singing a different tune.
video:
all starts w. B, impotred ebola, socilaim
PC 1st, palin incompetent, put am 1st; hannity, acted fastest, huckabee suck it out of lung, simg to bot ocean accused of pollution, beck, o'reilly, sqeeze on so border, now on ebola, lou dobbs neo-lib one-world statement vs protection; why trust our BO gov't to del w/ VS DJT encouarge hate, pirro, brit hume, left sez djt tries to spread in US as fast as possible?! weeak an tepid bureaicrat = BP, ingram party of pain and misry; top dems play blame game; react in recd time; huck BO no close border bc hurt feelings of other cty; O'R quar?; esoteric faculty lounge debate vs protect USA; trish regan emonize prez; calm leadrship; huck: wish i cd trust gov't i pay for to trust them, wish i could not reliable
In the lead up to the 2014 midterms, Fox News stoked fear in their viewers over the Ebola outbreak in Africa, even suggesting that Barack Obama wanted to infect America with the disease. As the country faces a legitimate pandemic under Trump, many of those same people are now singing a different tune.
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On multiple occasions, a Fox correspondent in Mexico floated a "rumor"that a migrant seeking asylum in America had Ebola. The "rumor" had already been debunked, of course, butSteve Doocy even**thanked the reporter**for bringing it up.There's a long history of nativists spreading rumors of diseases to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment, and it's arecurring feature on Fox.
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mma 320
2018, Donald Trump and then-national security adviser John Bolton fired the “entire pandemic response chain of command” implemented by former President Barack Obama following the 2014 Ebola crisis. Broadcast news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC have ignored the firings. In fact, Democratic presidential candidates were the only people to mention the firings -- so in practice, these networks are turning Trump's incompetence and irresponsibility into a partisan issue.
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Former deputy national security adviser: Obama left a solid ‘global health infrastructure’ — and Trump shut it down
According to former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, the Obama Administration left Trump with a solid “global health infrastructure” when the former president left office in January 2017.
mma 320
A
As the death toll rises and the coronavirus threatens to impact many aspects of the daily lives of Americans, right-wing media have disregarded the advice of public health expertsand spent this week rebranding COVID-19 as the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” virus. Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained this week how connecting groups of people to infectious diseases has historically been used to dehumanize people along racial and ethnic lines. Levenson concluded that “emphasizing place rather than the clinical details of how a disease works and spreads means that epidemics get a head start.” However, conservative media have purposely ignored the recommendations of experts in an effort to divert attention away from the Trump Administration’s slow initial response that potentially exacerbated the spread of the virus. Right-wing media’s efforts to rebrand the virus arrive amid concern over the political impact that the outbreak could have on the president’s reelection chances in 2020. |
| Fox News downplays coronavirus |
Fox News’ coverage of coronavirus has taken many ugly forms the past several weeks, including bigotry and promoting right-wing conspiracy theories. Even worse, the network has systematically downplayed the risk of the virus. That could get people killed. Considering Fox’s audience skews older - a population most at risk of adverse reactions to the virus - the network’s efforts to minimize the risk of the coronavirus are dangerous. Here are some of the ways Fox has downplayed the coronavirus or misrepresented the administration’s response to the outbreak:
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nurse under house arrest in maine? NJ christie?
white drs get adv rx and live, aa truck driver/ not so much
xenophobia
n multiple occasions, a Fox correspondent in Mexico floated a "rumor"that a migrant seeking asylum in America had Ebola. The "rumor" had already been debunked, of course, but Steve Doocy even thanked the reporter for bringing it up. There's a long history of nativists spreading rumors of diseases to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment, and it's a recurring feature on Fox.
ref
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/25/right-wing-media-keeps-rehashing-xenophobic-smear-immigrants-bring-diseases/210076
Conservative media frequently push the debunked claim that immigrants pose a threat to public health, merely changing the disease to fit their narrative. Fox News repackaged a popular nativist and anti-immigrant smear claiming that the child migrants from Central America were "an illegal health risk" and were bringing diseases into the country according to internal CDC emails.
On the April 25 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, anchor Heather Nauert reported that "disease" had come with the "thousands of immigrant children" who came to the United States in 2014, fleeing violence from their home countries. The assertion was based on documents recently made public by the conservative activist group Judicial Watch showing officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) coordinating responses for the possibility of unaccompanied minors arriving with tuberculosis:
[vid mma]
While the CDC acknowledged that “a small number of cases of TB have been identified,” it also noted that “CDC believes the unaccompanied children arriving from Central America pose little risk of spreading infectious diseases to the general public.”
Similar claims to Fox News' have been debunked by experts previously. In 2015 the fact-checking website PolitiFact examined Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's claim that "tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border" and wrote that "The experts we contacted agreed that there is no evidence of a massive influx of infections across the border" as a consequence of undocumented immigration. An NBC News report explained that, in fact, most of the illnesses found in unaccompanied child immigrants were “nothing unusual,” including the common cold and head lice. NBC also noted that mechanisms were put in place so that arrivals are screened for tuberculosis -- which is not casually transmitted -- and facilities with the capacity to quarantine were made available. According to the most recent data from the World Health Organization, immunization rates for tuberculosis in Central America are above 80 percent. Tuberculosis in the United States has had a declining incidence for decades, with a relatively small increase of 157 more cases in 2015, which, according to the CDC, cannot be pinned on a single variable like undocumented immigration, since funding for prevention has been reduced or stagnant nationwide.
However, the trope of immigrants carrying diseases to the United States is often perpetuated by anti-immigrant and nativist groups hoping to stoke fear and resentment towards immigrants. According to one expert, “There is a long, sad and shameful tradition in the United States in using fear of disease, contagion and contamination to stigmatize immigrants and foreigners.” Fox News and other conservative media figures -- including Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham -- have pushed this smear, blaming immigrants for diseases that range from leprosy, measles, chickenpox, and dengue to enterovirus and ebola, despite the absence of evidence showing a significant correlation. The Southern Poverty Law Center has explained that these claims "generally originate with modern nativist groups and ideologues." They are then presented by right-wing media as factual news, without the benefit of context or the opinions of experts that have explained how the threat that undocumented immigrants place on public health is "wildly overstated."
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also ref
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2018/10/29/leprosy-rabies-hiv-and-smallpox-fox-news-spreading-evidence-free-conspiracy-theories-disease/221911
mult vis lnx?
Leprosy, rabies, HIV and smallpox: Fox News is spreading evidence-free conspiracy theories of a disease infested migrant caravan
Research ››› October 29, 2018 ››› BRENDAN KARET & MADELINE PELTZ
Fox News has been actively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that the migrant caravan heading for the Southern U.S. border is a disease infested group of people who will infect the U.S. population if allowed entry. Over the past week, Fox hosts and guests have speculated that the migrants are carrying rabies, leprosy, smallpox, and AIDS among other diseases.
Fox hosts and guests claim migrants could have smallpox, leprosy, HIV, measles, rabies, and more
Fox host Laura Ingraham: “The list of diseases that are of concern, given the multitude of people crossing our border” includes “HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, TB, shigellosis, syphilis.”
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I don’t -- I don't have a lot of faith in the health screenings when you got 4,000 people coming to a bordercheck at one period of time.
I want to put up -- just to repeat what you just said -- I want to put up on the screen, again, the list of diseases that are of concern, given the multitude of people crossing our border.
So, we got HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, TB, shigellosis, syphilis, I know that chagas is another problem, and that’s insect-borne.
Thirteen times the likelihood for TB transmission, a foreign-born population, than the U.S.-born population. That’s just a fact. This is not political. This is not about your views on immigration. This is purely health. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/26/18]
Ingraham: “No one talks about the health implications”
DEREK MALTZ: We have mass amounts of people coming into our country with disease, with crime, with drugs. And you know what, we have to put it to the end.
...
MALTZ: All our kids and all the hardworking Americans have to pay the bill. And what about the diseases that are coming in from Africa? What about some of these new like, the TBs and all these different medical --
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): No one talks about the health implications. The financial implications are enormous. The health implications, I think the media like, where is all the investigative reporting on all of these diseases that are just popping up? Kids are being paralyzed like for bizarre reasons, like we don’t really even know. I am not saying it's immigration. We definitely have a TB problem, we also have Chagas disease, all sorts of other things. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/25/18]
Ingraham: “It’s a health issue too, because we don’t know what people have coming in here.”
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Congressman [Steve] Scalise, we don't really have time to do anything before this midterm election.
This is a national security issue, an economic issue, costs taxpayers billions of dollars to take all these people in, public schools, health care, all of it we know.
It's a health issue too, because we don't know what people have coming in here. We have diseases in this country we haven't had for decades. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/23/18]
Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “What about diseases? I mean, there is a reason you can’t bring a kid to school unless he is inoculated.”
BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): What about diseases? I mean, there is a reason why you can't bring a kid to school unless he is inoculated. You know?
There’s -- there’s things that happen in this country -- we already give 40 to 50 percent of our taxable income to the government for social programs.
Is it too much to say that we just can't have countries, entire populations, come in here without being looked at as hard-hearted? To me, it is a practical way of having a nation that everyone looks up to and wants to be a part of. That's part of the reason why America is America, there’s a process. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 10/29/18]
Fox guest David Ward: “They are coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and T.B. that are going to infect our people in the United States.”
DAVID WARD: Then public health, we have these individuals coming from all over the world that have the -- some of the most extreme medical care in the world, and they are coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and TB that are going to infect our people in the United States. [Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto, 10/29/18]
Sidney Powell: "We have diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio-like paralysis of our children."
SIDNEY POWELL: We simply cannot tolerate the continued invasion of this country when Americans are suffering every day. The national debt is exploding. We have diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio-like paralysis of our children. It's one thing after the other. [Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, 10/29/18]
Video by Miles Le
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Posted In
Immigration, Immigration Myths
Network/Outlet
Fox News Channel
Person
Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, Charles Payne
Show/Publication
The Ingraham Angle, Your World with Neil Cavuto, FOX & Friends
Stories/Interests
Immigration, Conspiracy Theories
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