U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the signing ceremony for an executive order on mail ballots, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026. REUTERS Evan Vucci File Photo
President Donald Trump once tweeted that President Barack Obama should resign because his predecessor allowed a doctor who treated Ebola patients to return to New York City. As an Ebola outbreak in Africa threatens the United States, that tweet has come back to haunt him.
“In 2014 Trump said Obama should resign when a single physician who treated patients in an Ebola-endemic area returned to NYC,” recalled Todd Zwillich, a former reporter at NPR and Vice, in an X post on Thursday. In the tweet in question, Trump argued that “if this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa,has Ebola,then Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!”
Although Trump argued that Obama should have restricted the aforementioned doctor’s travel, experts say that much more is needed to protect the American people from a potentially devastating pandemic, whether Ebola or anything else. Ebola, however, particularly alarms health officials because of its high mortality rate (averaging 50 percent) and gruesome symptoms, including abrupt onset of fever, severe joint and muscle pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, rashes, red eyes and massive internal hemorrhaging.
Experts agree that travel bans, which Trump is using as the sole method for preventing transmission, are not effective.
“Travel bans are generally not effective for the control of infectious diseases,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told AlterNet. “For instance, the Omicron variant was first discovered for COVID-19 in South Africa on November 26, 2021 and was here in San Francisco two days later because air travel is so frequent and SARS-CoV-2 can spread when asymptomatic.”
She added, “Ebola virus is not spread by respiratory droplets, but by close contact with infected fluids either from a live body or someone with Ebola who has passed away. This is not the kind of contact that happens during travel and so restricting travel from countries with this outbreak is not going to control Ebola entry into the U.S.”
In a 2015 article for the scientific journal European Surveillance, a team of 10 scientists comprehensively reviewed transportation and medical data related to the 2013-2016 Western African Ebola outbreak. It reinforced Dr. Gandhi’s conclusions.
“This study indicates that travel bans are only delaying the further international spread of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa for a limited time, at the risk of compromising connectivity to the region, mobilisation of resources to the affected area and sustained response operations, all actions of critical value for the immediate local control of EVD and for preventing its further geographical spread,” the authors wrote. “Any decision making process on this issue must take into account complex cost-benefit analyses of travel bans.”
To protect Americans from Ebola, Trump will need to utilize overseas programs that focus on preventing the transmission of infectious diseases. Yet a recent report from The Washington Post revealed that many of the programs Trump cut with the assistance of Elon Musk, X CEO and the world’s richest man, were vital to serve that exact purpose.
“Medical personnel in the Democratic Republic of Congo know what it takes to get an Ebola outbreak under control,” reported The Post’s Rael Ombuor, Rachel Chason, Lauren Weber and Lena H. Sun on Thursday. “They have confronted 17 episodes of the disease in the past 50 years. But this time, they say, they just don’t have the capacity.”
Pointing to the sweeping cuts imposed not just by other Western nations and institutions like the World Health Organization, but also by the United States, The Post reported that the cuts “left frontline health agencies dangerously under-resourced as this Ebola outbreak erupted and spread with alarming speed. Aid groups and health officials say they lacked the staff, surveillance systems and emergency supplies needed to quickly detect early infections or contain the virus as cases surged in recent days.”
Oxfam’s country director in Congo Manenji Mangundu told The Post that “before, there were resources available, there were international organizations reaching out. Now, we are just not seeing the resources coming in as we would want. And we are watching cases rise. We are very, very worried.”
