I have seen the horrors of viral hemorrhagic fever up close, which is exactly why I applaud the Trump administration for cutting the red tape preventing its spread.
I still remember the smell of the isolation ward in Monrovia. The suffocating heat of the protective suits. The haunting, hollowed-out eyes of the afflicted as their bodies betrayed them in the most violent ways imaginable. It was 2014, and I had been flown in on a specialized, heavily guarded medical transport to observe the international response. Watching a human being succumb to Zaire ebolavirus is a profoundly humbling experience, one that strips away all our modern illusions of invincibility and forces us to confront our fragility. And as I stood there, watching doctors work tirelessly around the clock in unimaginable conditions, only one thought crossed my mind: Do we really need to be paying for all these gloves?
This is why I was quietly relieved when the Trump administration made the difficult, deeply unpopular, but ultimately necessary decision to gut the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. The media, naturally, was hysterical. They claimed that firing the very people tasked with coordinating a federal response to global pandemics was somehow dangerous or shortsighted. They pointed to the devastating mortality rates of viral hemorrhagic fevers and screeched about preventable catastrophes. But what the mainstream press fundamentally misunderstands about Ebola is that it is, at its core, a regulatory overreach issue.
I had the opportunity to discuss this exact dynamic over pan-seared scallops with John Bolton shortly after he arrived at the White House to reorganize the National Security Council. John is a man who understands that true national security isn’t about coddling citizens with bloated virology budgets. We were sitting at a quiet corner table at the Hay-Adams, and he looked at me, completely unprompted, and said that the sheer amount of red tape required just to maintain a global surveillance network for emerging pathogens was staggering. Do you know how many interagency meetings are required to mobilize an international quarantine? It is highly inefficient. By simply firing the people who hold those meetings, the administration streamlined the federal government overnight.
Critics will argue that having a team of experts dedicated to monitoring infectious diseases is a basic function of a modern state. But this betrays a fundamental lack of faith in the free market. When I was in West Africa, I saw firsthand the chilling effect that massive international aid operations have on local innovation. When the CDC and the WHO swoop in with their millions of dollars in federal funding, their experimental vaccines, and their sterile IV fluids, they crowd out private sector solutions. If there is a genuine consumer demand for not bleeding to death from the eyes, I assure you, an entrepreneur will step up to fill that void. We do not need Washington picking winners and losers in the hemorrhagic fever space.
Consider the USAID’s PREDICT program, which the administration smartly shut down. For a decade, this program squandered over two hundred million dollars doing nothing but tromping through foreign jungles, swabbing bat guano, and identifying over a thousand novel viruses before they could infect humans. Think about the sheer arrogance of that. The government was spending taxpayer dollars to look for problems that had not even happened yet. It is like paying a mechanic to stare at your car’s engine just in case it breaks down in five years. The administration recognized that if a bat virus wants to mutate and jump to a pangolin, and then to a human, it is simply the invisible hand of nature at work. Who are we to regulate the marketplace of biology?
The problem with preemptive pandemic preparedness is that it creates a moral hazard. If the federal government guarantees a coordinated global response to every novel pathogen, the average citizen loses all incentive to independently optimize their own white blood cell count.
Arthur is entirely right. We have created a culture of dependency. By funding the NSC pandemic office, we were essentially telling the American people not to worry about maintaining their personal supply of fluid-resistant biohazard suits because the nanny state will do it for them. This is the exact kind of creeping socialism that weakens the moral fabric of a nation. When the next deadly virus inevitably makes the leap from an animal host to a human population, do we want to be a country of helpless victims waiting for a government-funded epidemiologist to save us? Or do we want to be a nation of rugged individualists, facing down a massive mortality rate with nothing but grit, determination, and a high-deductible health savings account?
I have seen Ebola. I know what it does to a community. I have stared into the abyss of one of the most terrifying biological threats known to mankind. And that is exactly why I know we cannot afford to fight it. The fiscal health of the United States must come first. If we bankrupt ourselves buying protective equipment and funding global early-warning networks, the virus has already won. We must commend the administration for having the courage to look at a terrifying, highly contagious disease and say, firmly and resolutely, that it sounds like a personal problem.