An Ebola outbreak in a southwestern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is escalating quickly, as some health responders say they have less than a tenth of the funding needed to contain the deadly disease.
As of this week, there have been at least 57 cases and 35 deaths—a 61 percent fatality rate, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
I keep a CB radio in my car. It’s nice for keeping in contact with friends in another car on long road trips in places with bad cell service, and sometimes you can get useful traffic/road condition updates from truckers.
I also thought it might be nice to just kind of listen to the trucker chatter on long drives alone to stave off boredom and loneliness. Unfortunately, it turns out trucker conversations are rarely worth listening too, at best it’s usually stupid juvenile babbling, but there’s usually at least one lunatic ranting about politics and conspiracy theories.
Back when I still made an attempt to listen, there was one guy in my area a lot who was particularly unhinged.
This was back around 2014 or so, there was another ebola outbreak in Africa somewhere
And this guy was absolutely convinced that Obama was behind it somehow.
Funny thing about that, I remember a whole lot of conservatives being worked up about that outbreak, sure it was gonna become a pandemic. Some of them were even panic-buying masks. Weird how less than a decade later suddenly none of them wanted to wear those masks.
That ebola outbreak worried them enough that Obama created a task force to create a rapid response plan for the event of a major pandemic on US soil. We were lucky Obama was in office and surged aid. Now we fucked USAID and left the WHO under Trump.
Trump basically threw that plan in the trash when covid came.
Studies would later show Trump’s incompetence was responsible for 40% of the deaths. Meaning they were preventable.