The Atlantic Current, Ep. 47: Meredith Oglivie-Thompson on Africa, Ebola, and DOGE
The veteran journalist provides deep insight into a region neither Europeans nor Americans understand nearly well enough
As another Ebola outbreak threatens Central Africa, Vince and Tull are joined by journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson, who spent years covering stories — and witnessing past outbreaks — across the Continent. They discuss the importance of US aid cuts, the infrastructure and competence of African nations, and the counterproductive destruction by DOGE.
Episode Links:
Where To Find Meredith Oglivie-Thompson
Meredith’s Substack, “All That I Have Met”, is available here:
And here’s “My Brushes with Ebola”, published this week, which provided the quote at the introduction of the episode:
Thanks again to Meredith for joining us.
CDC Cut Off From WHO
As Meredith noted, the Trump Administration did indeed prohibit scientists from the Centers for Disease Control from communicating at all with the World Health Organization. The order came down within days of Trump taking office. A decision to exit the WHO followed, which (owing to a one-year waiting period) took effect in January of this year.
The justification from the Trump Administration is that the organization is poorly run and that it mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic. In a joint statement issued when the US withdrawal became official, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that “The WHO tarnished and trashed everything that America has done for it.”
While there no doubt were missteps, and perhaps some room for reform, as Meredith noted the WHO has played a hugely important role in global health — and there are quite a few successes on its resume as well. And from the American side, it’s not hard to imagine that Trump — who flat-out lied to the American public about the pandemic for weeks— is looking for a scapegoat. Whatever the actual reasoning (and it’s hard, at this point, to have much faith in this administration’s motives), the US exit from the WHO is troubling and a potential issue in combating epidemics such as the current Ebola crisis in Africa.
Musk Cuts Ebola Funding
We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. When we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. We restored the Ebola prevention immediately — and there was no interruption.
That was Elon Musk in February 2025, in one of the more damning and undercovered stories of the Trump Administration’s first few weeks. Musk of course was in charge of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), tasked with slashing government spending.
The idea that Ebola prevention — a long-running program whose importance is obvious on its face — could be “accidentally canceled” itself spoke volumes about how DOGE was going about its business. So did another stunning ‘accident’ in which DOGE fired hundreds of workers ensuring the safety of America’s nuclear weapons, only to try and rehire them almost instantly.
The need for speed over accuracy was never fully explained. The thought might have been that DOGE had to move as quickly as possible, before bureaucrats and Congress blocked their mission. And, to be fair, to some extent that is what happened. The agency is still around, and claims $215 billion in savings to this point. But experts long have questioned those numbers, and the figure has moved little in months now.
But with something like Ebola prevention (or nuclear safety), the lack of caution is alarming, to put it mildly. Meanwhile, in the case Musk appears to have been simply lying. Contracts were canceled literally hours after he made that statement, and his claim that Ebola prevention saw no interruption was not at all true on the ground.
And as Vince and Meredith noted, the impact is being seen at the moment. Whatever the motive in Musk’s head, the results have been dismal. As Vince has said, Musk remains one of the greatest corporate leaders ever, but his track record in government of late and his penchant for dishonesty both leave much to be desired. Tull and Vince discussed Musk (truly a fascinating character, in part because of his flaws) at length in Episode 10:
Episode 10 Links:
The Lancet Sees 91 Million Lives Saved
Meredith was right: a study in The Lancet (one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world) estimated that USAID efforts had saved more than 91 million lives. Incredibly — and horribly — the study projected that the defunding of the agency would, by 2030, have led to more than 14 million excess deaths.
Irish Battle in Kinshasa / Netflix Movie
The Irish Army’s battle in Congo, referred to by Tull in this episode, is now known as the “Siege of Jadotville”. The movie produced by Netflix came out in 2016 (and won several awards in Ireland).
The battle took place in 1961, with a badly undermanned battalion serving under United Nations command holding out against thousands of rebels fighting on behalf of a province looking to secede. (The Irish had 155 soliders; it is etimated that they were fighting a force of about 4,000.) The Irish soldiers did eventually surrender, and were held as prisoners of war for a month,
The deployment to the country the previous year was in fact the first armed overseas mission in the history of the Irish Republic. And in the eyes of the government, it didn’t go well. Veterans of the fighting were not treated as heroes, but rather soldiers who had surrendered. The government refused repeatedly to honor the battalion, though vindication finally arrived last decade, as ministers and functionaries worked incredibly hard to honor the group. But old wounds don’t fade easily: the family of the battalion’s commander, Pat Quinlan, has refused a Distinguished Service Medal issued on his behalf.
Update, Ep. 36: JD Vance and Sex Scandals
We somehow missed it among other news, but at the end of April Mark Sanford dropped out of the race for the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina. We told the long, bizarre story of Sanford’s career, in which a potential White House run was derailed by one of the stranger sex scandals in American history. Vince narrated the story of Sanford and the Appalachian Trail in Ep. 36 — we’ve broken the story out as a long (but worthwhile!) clip on YouTube:
One of the points Vince made during the story is that, at least as a politician, Sanford did show some principle. From the time he entered the House of Representatives in 1994 as part of the “Republican Revolution”, Sanford argued fervently that government spending needed to slow. And indeed, as governor of South Carolina, Sanford (mostly) abided by that belief.
At the age of 65, and with the federal debt now at a staggering $39 trillion, Sanford remains steadfast. He is abandoning the House race (after a campaign that lasted just 30 days) to start a nonprofit aimed at tackling that debt. Personal foibles aside, one has to give Sanford some credit for political consistency.
Meredith’s Money Quotes
On why US foreign aid is not charitable spend, but strategic investment:
This was not charity ever. This was absolute self-interest on the part of the United States. Africa has the largest young population in the world. And you have people between nineteen and thirty who, if they aren’t healthy, if they don’t get job training, if there’s not investment in their communities and their countries, you have high rates of unemployment amongst a youthful population that is much more likely to cause political unrest. If you’ve got a good job and your family is fed, you’re not going out and protesting or trying to overthrow a government.
A quote of many on why the competence, and even brilliance, of the African medical community is underappreciated:
This is not a question of the United States, as Trump likes to posture, [providing] charity or that Africans don’t pull their weight. Some of the most prominent epidemiologists, physicians who have been on the front lines of these diseases since they were discovered initially in the 60s and 70s have been extraordinary in helping to identify, track, and trace these diseases.
Tull’s Money Quote
Tull adding another angle on why the US cuts in Africa have been so short-sighted:
They’ve a one track mind that think everything outside the United States is terrible and they have no bigger geopolitical strategic thinking going on there all. It’s just, you know cut, cut, cut and we’re saving the American people tax dollars, but in reality it’s going to cost them much, much more further down the line.
Vince’s Money Quotes
On DOGE cuts, which Vince previously called the biggest lowlight of 2025:
The way that they did it, to me, seemed just staggeringly stupid and incompetent. If you’re going to sincerely make that argument, then you go to all the nonprofits and you say, ‘Right, well you guys got twelve months.’ Rubio famously said, ‘Why isn’t the United Kingdom funding this?’ Well, they can’t fund it if you silently cut it forty eight hours after you took office. They need a little bit of time.
And the bizarre American insistence that foreign aid is bankrupting the country:
There’s an oddly widespread belief here that I’ve seen among lots of people at lots of different times — it’s not a Trump specific thing — that the US spends vast, vast sums of wealth on foreign aid. I really think if you did a survey of a thousand Americans and you said what percentage of our budget goes to foreign aid, I think the average response would be like twenty percent.