Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts disagree.

Elon Musk spoke bluntly about his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect," he said. "When we make mistakes, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention."

"We restored the Ebola prevention immediately — and there was no interruption," Musk continued.

Public health experts say U.S. support has not been fully restored.

"I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

Hours after Musk asserted that USAID had restored its Ebola prevention efforts, the agency informed several organizations working with the U.S. government to prevent the spread of the virus overseas that their contracts had been terminated, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. The organizations — which included UNICEF, which had been working with USAID on Ebola prevention in Uganda and other countries — were among thousands of organizations affected by the Trump administration’s move to cancel foreign-assistance contracts on Wednesday.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks. Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week.

Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri’s assessment. “There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”

Jeremy Konyndyk used to lead what was called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID, which deployed on the ground in disasters like Ebola: "The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists. All of those people are gone. The operation centers that they worked out of are shut down. They can't even access the Ronald Reagan Building where those operation centers sit. That lease has been handed over to Customs and Border Protection," he says.

He called Musk's reassurance that things have been restored "total garbage."

Inquiries to USAID and the State Department about what was canceled and restored, and when, were not answered. The White House declined to comment on whether USAID’s Ebola-response efforts had been fully restored.

As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO. The World Health Organization often serves a critical function in outbreak responses. Even if the response is led by the country in which the outbreak is happening, WHO provides expert advice and helps coordinate efforts.

CDC officials "aren't allowed to go to meetings with the World Health Organization, something they would have done in every single outbreak of Ebola — or other viral hemorrhagic fever disease – to date," Spencer says. "From top to bottom, none of the things that they have canceled have been put back in place."