FC/M23 soldiers are seen ensuring the safety of the movement’s leaders at the Rodolphe Mérieux Laboratory, National Biomedical Research Institute (INRB) in Goma on May 19, 2026, during a tour of the facility, which handles suspected Ebola cases. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization expressed concern over the “scale and speed” of an Ebola outbreak that has claimed an estimated 131 lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and warned of its potential persistence. The UN health body has declared the surge of this highly contagious hemorrhagic fever an international health emergency and called for an urgent crisis meeting. There is no vaccine or therapeutic treatment for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola causing the outbreak, which has resulted in over 15,000 deaths across Africa in the last fifty years. (Photo by Jospin Mwisha / AFP via Getty Images)
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In August 2014, as the Ebola crisis in West Africa intensified, spreading to Americans who were subsequently evacuated to the United States, I authored a Forbes article titled “Ebola Has Landed.” The apprehension back then extended beyond the virus’s ability to cross borders; it symbolized a warning about the world’s vulnerability to biological crises due to globalization, weak healthcare systems, delayed political actions, and insufficient bio-defense strategies.
A fortnight later, I penned a piece in Bloomberg-Businessweek arguing that the Ebola crisis would not cease without military intervention. This notion, considered controversial at the time, confronted policymakers in infectious disease response. Ebola had escalated from being a humanitarian emergency to a national security threat.
A Dozen Years Later, Many Vulnerabilities From 2014 Ebola Remain Unaddressed
Today, Ebola holds a peculiar position in global awareness. It is remembered as a major infectious-disease scare of our time but is largely overlooked outside the realm of public health. Although COVID-19 surpassed Ebola in terms of scale and economic impact, Ebola was, in many ways, a precursor. The significant failures evident during COVID — such as delayed diagnostics, flawed communication, overwhelmed healthcare systems, disrupted supply chains, and political stalemates — were all present during the West African Ebola epidemic.
Ebola’s Scale Made the Difference
The West African Ebola epidemic infected over 28,000 people and claimed more than 11,000 lives across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Healthcare systems nearly crumbled, hospitals became centers of transmission, and a large number of medical staff died. Traditional burial practices exacerbated the spread, and global fear mounted even in areas with low transmission risk.
This outbreak exposed a harsh reality: societies were far less ready for biological emergencies than anticipated. What changed post-2014 was not just institutional resilience but scientific advancements.
Since the initial outbreak, significant progress has been made with effective vaccines and therapeutics targeting the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. Ring-vaccination strategies and monoclonal antibody treatments significantly improved containment and survival rates in later outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Science played a crucial role in addressing the Ebola issue, but alone it cannot stabilize a failing system. This remains the primary challenge today.
Ebola outbreaks continue in Central and East Africa, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The virus endures in animal reservoirs, occasionally spilling into human populations due to environmental disruption, migration, conflict, and human encroachment into isolated ecosystems.
Ebola’s danger lies not only in its mortality rate but in the context of its emergence. The current outbreak of the Ebola Bundibugyo strain highlights this fact. Unlike the Zaire strain, there are no widely available licensed vaccines or proven treatments for Bundibugyo Ebola. Once more, containment heavily relies on early detection, isolation, logistics, infection control, and coordinated international efforts.
The World Remains Reactive, Not Prepared
A lasting lesson from Ebola is that outbreaks are rarely just medical issues. They serve as geopolitical and institutional stress tests. Ebola spreads most effectively where governance is weak, healthcare underfunded, and public trust eroded. This is why the 2014 debate on military intervention was crucial.
During the peak of the West African crisis, Médecins Sans Frontières cautioned that civilian humanitarian infrastructure alone could not contain the epidemic. Peter Piot, one of Ebola’s discoverers in 1976, called for a “quasi military intervention.” The United States eventually launched Operation United Assistance, deploying military logistics, engineering support, transport capability, and treatment-center construction into Liberia.
These statements once seemed extreme but, in hindsight, were practical. Perhaps nothing illustrates Ebola’s precariousness better than the ongoing attacks on healthcare workers and treatment facilities.
In the original 2014 outbreak, fear and distrust in parts of Guinea led to attacks on healthcare teams, assaults on Red Cross burial teams, and murders of Ebola education workers. The infamous Womey massacre saw eight members of an Ebola outreach team killed by villagers who believed the disease response was part of a foreign conspiracy.
Ebola Dynamics Resurface in 2026
Recently, two Ebola treatment centers in eastern Congo were set ablaze by locals protesting burial restrictions and distrusting authorities. In Mongbwalu, a Doctors Without Borders treatment tent was torched, allowing several suspected Ebola patients to escape. Days earlier, another center was burned when families were barred from retrieving the body of a suspected Ebola victim due to infection-control measures.
These events are not isolated but highlight that Ebola containment relies more on social trust than on medical technology. The disease spreads through human contact, caregiving, and burial traditions, but fear spreads even faster. When communities perceive treatment centers as places of no return, public-health systems start fracturing. Patients hide symptoms, families avoid surveillance, and healthcare workers become targets instead of protectors.
This is why Ebola remains particularly dangerous even with vaccines and advanced treatments. The challenge is no longer just scientific; it is societal.
COVID-19 exacerbated these fractures. Globally, public-health institutions emerged weakened and politically divided. Healthcare burnout increased, vaccine skepticism grew, international coordination weakened, and many healthcare systems remain understaffed and exhausted.
These conditions create a precarious environment for managing diseases like Ebola, where rapid public cooperation and trusted communication are crucial. The most significant vulnerability is the lack of reliable diagnostics.
A recurring issue across Ebola, COVID-19, monkeypox, Hantavirus, and other emerging infectious diseases is the absence of rapid, field-deployable diagnostic systems where outbreaks begin. Delays in identifying Ebola cases allow silent transmission chains to develop before containment measures can be enforced.
Not Just a Scientific Failure – It’s an Infrastructure Failure
The core issue is that biological threats increasingly intersect with national security, migration, urbanization, environmental degradation, and irregular conflict. Conflict zones weaken surveillance, population displacement speeds transmission, and dense urban centers provide new pathways for spread.
Ebola is less a story of tropical medicine and more a warning about systemic fragility. The critical realization is that Ebola was never an anomaly but an early warning signal.
Since 2014, the world has faced COVID-19, Zika, monkeypox, avian influenza concerns, increasing antimicrobial resistance, and recurring hemorrhagic-fever outbreaks. Each crisis has reinforced an unsettling truth: biological instability is on the rise while institutional resilience struggles to keep up.
Reflecting back, “Ebola Has Landed” was not just about a virus reaching American shores. It signaled an era where infectious diseases would become significant geopolitical and economic forces.
The controversial conclusion during the darkest times of 2014 — that the Ebola crisis necessitated military-scale mobilization — might have been the clearest insight of all: modern epidemics are no longer merely public-health emergencies. They are tests of national capability, political coordination, logistics, infrastructure, and societal trust.
The virus itself has changed little, but the world around it has transformed significantly.
