One day, Elon decided to cut just about all funding to USAID. The only exceptions were aid to Israel, Egypt, and some food programs. That means that every single other program under USAID would be cut. And that includes USAID’s efforts to stop the spread of Ebola.
Elon said that this program was “accidentally canceled.” He also said that, “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect.” And earlier he also said that “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect” so now I’m not sure whether to trust that Elon or the other Elon?
Anyway, it’s weird to cancel every single USAID program except for a specific few and then say that one of the canceled programs was canceled by accident. But genius can be weird sometimes.
Of course, it’s really hard to destroy something and then say Oops! and undo the damage you did. You can’t unstir the jam from the tea, as Tom Stoppard taught us. And this seems like a lesson that Elon might have already learned a couple of weeks ago, when he fired a bunch of nuclear scientists and then tried to rehire them but couldn’t find them. Seriously– here’s the quote from the BBC:
The Trump administration has since tried to reverse their terminations, according to media outlets, but has reportedly struggled to reach the people that were fired after they were locked out of their federal email accounts.
Oopsie!
It all seems so ridiculous, but then there’s yet another twist in the Ebola situation, according to the Washington Post:
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.
So they canceled the Ebola funding, said Oopsie, said they undid the cancellation, and THEN terminated the contracts of organizations working to prevent the spread of Ebola.
It all seems incompetent and at least borderline negligent.
But that’s just to someone who doesn’t see the genius in Elon’s maneuvering. See, previous Ebola outbreaks have been stopped, after thousands of very smart and very dedicated people worked to stop them. You end up with great pride-inducing headlines like these:
Ebola: How a killer disease was stopped in its tracks
(That one is from 2018, when Trump was president but he hadn’t get given Elon the keys to the … well, everything.)
Ebola Outbreak in Uganda Is Over: Here’s What Went Right
(That one is from 2023, when Biden was president. See, lots of presidents can stop Ebola!)
The problem with this headlines, and this should be obvious, is that we just don’t know how many people Ebola would have killed without the significant investments in intervention. Maybe a hundred. Maybe a million? More?
Scientists know the only way to answer this questions is through experimentation. And so Elon, in his typical genius way, is answering this question. He’s running an experiment to see how many people will die if we don’t bother to try to stop Ebola! Only then will we know how effective our previous efforts truly were.
Before you assume incompetence, look for the genius.
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