US well-positioned to deal with current Ebola outbreak, Deborah Birx says
President Donald Trump’s former Covid response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx expressed confidence Sunday that the United States can effectively respond to the current Ebola outbreak in Africa despite vacancies in key public health positions.
Speaking on “Face the Nation,” CBS’ Nancy Cordes noted that there is currently no confirmed leader for the Centers for Disease Control or the Food and Drug Administration, or anyone occupying the surgeon general position.
Birx said this may be concerning, but there are layers to professional leadership. “Yes, it is important to have leaders of all these agencies,” he told Cordes. “I think people have at least been nominated to the CDC, so I think that’s very important. But we have deep staff at most of these organizations, and I really know them. They’re great people.”
He added: “I think this cross-agency response is already putting assets, people and money on the ground.”
Birx, who helped coordinate the global response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, said it was also unclear whether the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and reduce international aid would in any way harm the response to the current outbreak.
“I think that’s a great question, and we really need to look at it,” Birx said, but added that she believed the cuts might not be as deep as portrayed.
“I was actually relieved by the numbers on paper,” he said.
Birx’s title from February 2020 until the end of Trump’s first term was White House coronavirus response coordinator; He reported directly to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Birx also served as the nation’s global AIDS coordinator under both Trump and then-President Barack Obama.
The current outbreak, believed to have started weeks ago, is centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda; One of the factors complicating this region is that the Democratic Republic of Congo is an area of ongoing military conflict. CDC announces travel restrictions to control the epidemic on Monday and that expanded these restrictions on Friday.
One thing that worried Birx was that it took some time to detect the outbreak, raising the possibility that people could be infected without knowing it.
“The problem with this particular outbreak is that there were probably two, three or four cycles of infection before it was reported, and so a lot of the numbers you’re seeing and the rapid increase in numbers is because it went undetected and underreported for probably three or four weeks,” Birx said.
“This has led to a large number of cases being reported at the same time, and so I can’t really tell you what the trend of new cases is,” he said.
