In 2015, just as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa had begun to taper, I teamed up with computational geneticist Dr. Pardis Sabeti to survey more than 200 Ebola responders about their experiences during its height. Journalists don’t typically team up with their sources to work on an investigation, but our experiences demanded our collaboration.
Sabeti and her lab had been conducting extensive research in Kenema, Sierra Leone, which soon became one of the areas hardest hit by the outbreak. Her team had faced major barriers as they conducted lifesaving research that changed the way scientists understood the disease. The frustrations culminated with the death of their colleague, a renowned Sierra Leonean virologist who died of Ebola after treating so many others with the disease.
Our conversations during the efforts to stymie the spread of Ebola prompted me to compare our experiences to previous major outbreaks around the world. I began to see patterns emerge. And we wondered whether our experiences could apply to any outbreak environment. Our first look into that question only scratched the surface of what we would soon find.
Nearly all respondents to our survey had found that at times political and interpersonal challenges slowed the response to the outbreak. Many reportedly feared the politics more than the virus. Some said these various challenges put them at higher risk of contracting the virus. More than a quarter reported either witnessing, hearing about or falling victim to illegal or unethical tactics while working in their respective capacities.
Nearly all respondents to our survey had found that at times political and interpersonal challenges slowed the response to the outbreak. Many reportedly feared the politics more than the virus.
Some of the reported tactics included: money and other forms of aid disappearing before it reached its intended recipients; inadequate and knowingly defective personal protective equipment sent to health workers treating Ebola patients; harmful competitive practices like intimidation and data hoarding to prevent some from conducting research in the field.
Many of the major themes that emerged from our survey matched reports I had examined amid past major outbreaks including AIDS and SARS, Zika and MERS. Some of our survey respondents also reported experiencing the same dysfunctions ― and sometimes worse ― during previous and subsequent large-scale epidemics, regardless of the name of the pathogen. I reached out to key sources who were critical decision-makers in outbreak response, and they also confirmed what repeated stories, and now the data, showed.
As a health journalist, I have reported on previous outbreaks that were devastating in their own right. But none was as fear-inducing as the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the largest and most widespread outbreak of the disease in history. Nearly 30,000 people were infected with the virus, and more than 11,000 died in the three hardest-hit countries: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Yes, the virus itself was an entity to fear, especially since no vaccine was available at the time. But what frightened me was everything that an outbreak brought to the environment it enveloped.
While mostly centered in West Africa, Ebola emerged in the U.S., and was in some ways a test run of our preparedness and abilities to respond to a large-scale epidemic. It did not go so well then. The 11 Ebola cases treated in the U.S. exposed the vulnerabilities of our health care system, which is significantly more developed than in West Africa.
In response to the crisis