> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”
It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.
Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.
The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)
I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:
1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left
2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).
Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.
So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.
And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?
> Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.
Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.
Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."
Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us while they escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants.
I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries.
But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.
That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.
Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.
This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.
I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed.
Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives.
Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.
And just like during the COVID pandemic, look who sits in the White (Casino) House again ... with Elon's DOGE having cut even more essential pandemic monitoring and response systems.
I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.
Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.
Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?
You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.
I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).
"Reports from anthropologists and public health workers described cases where relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."
I’ll do my best to avoid the whole overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.
There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.
Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”
It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.
Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.
The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)
I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:
1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left
2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
For EVs, yes, absolutely
Yip, outside the US BYD cars are absolutely everywhere, pretty awesome cars, and crazy cheap - like < $15k. Apparently < $10k within China itself.
Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).
[delayed]
Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.
So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.
You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting
And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?
I can't get my roof replaced in less than a year. These things take time .
> Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.
Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.
Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."
A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact.
https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323
Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us while they escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants.
I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries.
But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.
That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.
Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.
How you pull it back matters.
Why you were doing it in the first place matters, too.
I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..:
Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor:
https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8
Chatgpt the art critic:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c...
And grok somewhat of an apologist:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...
This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.
I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
A disease affecting developed countries impacts the entire world. A disease affecting the Congo doesn’t impact anything.
it doesn't until it does
I mean it obviously impacts the people who live in the Congo...
If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.
But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.
You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?
The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.
Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed.
Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives.
Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.
And just like during the COVID pandemic, look who sits in the White (Casino) House again ... with Elon's DOGE having cut even more essential pandemic monitoring and response systems.
> if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives
There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.
I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.
Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.
Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?
You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.
The "coughing up blood" symptom can cause you to come into contact with fluids involuntarily.
I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).
"Reports from anthropologists and public health workers described cases where relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."
I’ll do my best to avoid the whole overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...
Exacerbated*, however it surely is exasperating how poorly this is being handled.
So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?
That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.
0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.
Another Congo Ebola special: 17th outbreak since disco, hundreds 'suspected,' headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle.
> headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle
From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.
There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.
Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
I don't usually do this but...
You were right 6 years ago about a strong response needed for COVID: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22315024