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I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.

The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.

The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)

I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:

1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left

2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.

Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.

So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.

You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting

The US was a force for good in the world. There may be a million counterpoints but contemporary American was and still barely is a massive win for the world.

China is there when there is money to make or resources to grab, but in the last decades never helped any one else than themselves.

> Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.

One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.

Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.

I can't get my roof replaced in less than a year. These things take time .

A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact.

https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323

Why are you writing about / thinking about the things an AI model said to you? It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content. Of course it’s going to say nice things about Elon. It’s an LLM, not some kind of oracle. It seems like the existence of a massive Ebola outbreak is more worthy of discussion than some random LLM output related to it!

I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..:

Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor:

https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8

Chatgpt the art critic:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c...

And grok somewhat of an apologist:

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...

I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries.

But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.

That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.

Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.

Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low.

Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there.

It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.

I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.

> headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle

From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.

A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.

Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.

I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).

"Reports from anthropologists and public health workers described cases where relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."

I’ll do my best to avoid the whole overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.

The "coughing up blood" symptom can cause you to come into contact with fluids involuntarily.

Exacerbated*, however it surely is exasperating how poorly this is being handled.

So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?

0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.

And just like during the COVID pandemic, look who sits in the White (Casino) House again ... with Elon's DOGE having cut even more essential pandemic monitoring and response systems.

> if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives

There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.