This coming week, I will be leading a U.S. delegation to the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda to learn about the situation on the ground and thank these governments for their efforts. I will be joined by Dr. Redfield, Dr. Fauci, Admiral Timothy Ziemer of USAID, and officials from NSC. We will not just be learning about the situation and meeting with our national and international counterparts, but also reiterating the U.S. commitment to bringing this outbreak to an end.
As Prepared for Delivery
Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us on this call.
The goal today is to provide an update on the United States’ efforts to combat what we consider one of the most serious global health challenges facing the world: the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This coming week, I will be leading a U.S. delegation to the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda to learn about the situation on the ground and thank these governments for their efforts. I will be joined by Dr. Redfield, Dr. Fauci, Admiral Timothy Ziemer of USAID, and officials from NSC. We will not just be learning about the situation and meeting with our national and international counterparts, but also reiterating the U.S. commitment to bringing this outbreak to an end.
Since the outbreak began in August 2018, it has infected more than 3,000 people and stolen more than 2,000 lives. Monitoring the outbreak, coordinating with the DRC and other governments, and providing the necessary financial, technological, and scientific assistance has been one of the top global health priorities for the Trump administration over the past year.
Unfortunately, the outbreak shows no signs of slowing—this is a highly infectious disease, occurring in one of the most remote, least developed, and most dangerous locations on earth. But it’s important for people to understand what the U.S. government has been doing, because it has been a top focus right from the start of the outbreak.
In particular, I want to highlight our international leadership and cooperation, the support provided by HHS and the whole Trump Administration, and what we’re doing to assist the DRC and neighboring nations.
On an international or multilateral front, the U.S. government, and I personally, have been engaged on this with the World Health Organization and Director-General Tedros from the very beginning. We’ve been pleased to see WHO’s commitment to the response, and willingness to modify its approach on the ground in response to changing circumstances. Our international work has led to widespread commitments not only from WHO, but from partner nations, toward work like purchases of investigational Ebola vaccines.
Through HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, the United States recently committed $23 million in new funding to the purchase of investigational vaccines, bringing BARDA’s total investment in Ebola vaccines to $176 million and ensuring another year of manufacturing by Merck.
As of September 2, this vaccine has been used to vaccinate more than 211,000 people, including responders on the ground and those who may have been exposed to Ebola, through ring vaccinations.
I want to mention two other major elements of support from HHS: technical cooperation provided by the CDC and support from NIH for the development of Ebola therapeutics.
CDC has been working with the DRC for several decades now, and efforts to strengthen their core public health capacity to respond to infectious disease outbreaks accelerated as part of work to implement the Global Health Security Agenda. CDC personnel are directly on ground assisting the Ebola response not only in DRC, but also supporting WHO in Geneva and in neighboring countries. In a few minutes, Dr. Redfield will share more details about that ongoing work and the contributions of CDC.
The other element I want to emphasize is the support for a promising ongoing therapeutics trial in the eastern DRC. It is a remarkable tribute to American leadership and international cooperation that we are able to support a clinical trial in such a destabilized region of the DRC.
The trial began in November 2018, is co-sponsored and funded by the DRC government and NIH, and is being carried out by an international research consortium coordinated by the WHO. Dr. Fauci will explain more about progress on therapeutics shortly.
Those three pieces—support for vaccines, technical cooperation, and therapeutics development—are just three pieces of a much broader response, which involves the whole of the U.S. government.
The DRC is facing the most complex Ebola outbreak we’ve ever seen. But today, thanks to hard work by the U.S., the private sector, other national governments, and the international community, we have highly effective tools that didn’t exist during the world’s last major outbreak. There are vaccines available, governments in the region have improved their preparedness, and we have promising therapeutics.
These tools, along with the commitment and cooperation we have across the Trump Administration and with our global partners, give us confidence that we will bring this outbreak to an end. But it will not be easy.
Ending the outbreak will take continued commitments and persistence from all the partners I’ve mentioned today, which is why we want to ensure that the media understands the gravity of the situation and the efforts currently underway.
So with that, I will turn things over to Dr. Robert Redfield, our CDC director, who has worked closely on the outbreak and already traveled to the DRC himself.
Dr. Redfield?
