Ebola Should Have Immunized the United States to the Coronavirus – By Christopher Kirchhoff (Foreign Affairs) / March 28 2020
What Washington Failed to Learn From the National Security Council’s Ebola Report
In international crises, policymakers and politicians rarely have a dress rehearsal before their debut on the main stage. Yet in retrospect, the Ebola outbreak of 2013–15 amounts to exactly that—a real-life test of Washington’s ability to detect and contain an infectious disease that threatens global security. Precisely because those who fought the spread of the Ebola virus knew how close we came to global catastrophe, the National Security Council initiated a detailed study of the successes and failures of the international and domestic responses. Starting in February 2015, 26 departments and agencies across the U.S. government participated in a “lessons learned” process headed by the White House that produced a 73-page analysis with 21 findings and recommendations. I led this effort, under the stewardship of National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Ebola Czar Ron Klain, and I authored the NSC report recently made public by The New York Times.
It was clear to those who responded to the Ebola outbreak that the response system of the United States and the international response system would risk collapse if faced with a more dire scenario. It was equally clear that a more dire scenario taking place was a question of when, not if. As the NSC report concluded, “future epidemics, especially those that are airborne and transmissible before symptoms appear, are plausibly far more dangerous.” It continued: “An appropriate minimum planning benchmark . . . might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult . . . with much more significant domestic spread.”
Although the costs of the current pandemic will not be fully measurable for some time, what was done and what was left undone in the nearly four years between the end of the Ebola crisis and the first appearance of COVID-19 is now in the public domain. It is all too clear how and when the United States failed to better prepare.
THE OUTBREAK LAST TIME
The Ebola virus dominated headlines in the United States in the summer and fall of 2014, as it spread uncontrollably across West Africa; Thomas Duncan became the first infected person to die of the disease on U.S. soil. Ultimately, Ebola claimed the lives of over 11,000 people worldwide and two people in the United States. But those who participated in the response overwhelmingly came away with the view that it could have been exponentially worse.
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