GENEVA — Marco Rubio’s comments on Ebola show he doesn’t understand what the World Health Organization does, the agency’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested Wednesday.
The U.S. secretary of state had claimed Tuesday night that the WHO was “a little late” to detect the deadly outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is spreading rapidly through the war-torn country.
“We don’t replace the countries’ work, we only support them,” Tedros told reporters at WHO headquarters. “It could be from lack of understanding of how [the International Health Regulations] work and [the] responsibilities of WHO and other entities,” he said of Rubio’s comments.
The exchange marks a further deterioration in relations between the WHO and its once-largest funder after the U.S. withdrew from the United Nations global health agency in January.
But it wasn’t the only message the WHO had for its former member.
The agency also pushed back on the prospect of travel bans after the U.S. on Monday closed its border to non-U.S. travelers from the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Uganda, in an attempt to prevent the deadly Bundibugyo virus from entering its territory.
The WHO’s Abdirahman Mahamud, a department director in the agency’s Emergency Health Programme, urged countries instead to focus on “what works,” including contact tracing and isolation, noting that Congo and Uganda were already screening outbound travelers.
Travel restrictions are “not supported” under the WHO’s regulations on outbreak prevention and response, added Lucille Blumberg, a professor at the University of Pretoria and the chair of the WHO’s expert committee on the outbreak, which met Tuesday evening.
“It’s important to remember and recognize how Ebola is transmitted,” Blumberg said. “It requires direct contact with blood and body fluids of an infected person. So it’s not casual contact; it’s not airborne.”
In Europe, flights to and from the region remain unaffected, with planes from Congo capital Kinshasa landing daily in Brussels. Meanwhile the bloc has so far accepted two U.S. citizens from the region: a doctor with confirmed Ebola is receiving treatment in a Berlin hospital, while a contact of an Ebola case is being taken to a clinic in Czech capital Prague. Rubio and the U.S. embassy in Czechia expressed their thanks.
There have been almost 600 suspected cases and 139 suspected deaths in the outbreak so far, Tedros said. “We know the scale of the epidemic in the DRC is much larger,” he added.
As a disease, Ebola is caused by a group of viruses — in this case the rarer Bundibugyo virus for which there are no vaccines or treatments. Infection initially causes flu-like symptoms, followed by vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding from the nose or in a victim’s feces.
The WHO is investigating when and where the outbreak began but estimates it started “a couple of months ago,” according to WHO emergencies expert Anaïs Legand. The agency supported Congo as soon as the first warning signs were reported, she said.
Tedros added that any delays in detection were due to the growing intensity of the conflict in Congo in the past two months, the mass displacement of people, and the rare viral strain that is causing the current outbreak, which meant it wasn’t detected by testing for the more common Ebola Zaire strain. Typhoid and malaria, which cause the same early symptoms as Bundibugyo, are also endemic in the areas affected.
Armand Sprecher, an epidemiologist and ebola expert at humanitarian NGO Doctors Without Borders, told POLITICO that conflict complicates outbreak responses because regions damaged by violence tend to distrust outsiders. “It’s not easy to step into some place and start telling people what to do,” he said.
Tedros also stressed that countries are responsible for identifying disease outbreaks, not the WHO. But as soon as Ebola was suspected, he noted, the WHO stepped up to help.
While Rubio blamed the WHO for being slow to detect the disease, humanitarian groups say U.S. funding cuts have weakened the region’s ability to identify and respond quickly to epidemics like Ebola.
Although U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t withdraw from the WHO until January, he stopped paying America’s dues — which comprised some 20 percent of the U.N. body’s annual budget — a year before that. Trump said he had done so partly because the WHO bungled the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this decade, an accusation the health body denied.
Trump last year also tasked tech entrepreneur Elon Musk with slashing funding for USAID, the government’s international development arm. Spending fell from $8 billion in 2024 to $5.8 billion in 2025 while further commitments fell from $9.2 billion to $3.5 billion during this time, according to an analysis by the Center for Global Development.
The Democratic Republic of Congo was hit especially hard with a 68 percent funding cut over this period, dropping from $1.3 billion to $428 million. By contrast, the EU’s entire humanitarian aid budget for 2026 is €1.9 billion, including €557 million for West and Central Africa. EU countries also fund projects in the region, but larger funders including Germany, France and the U.K. have all cut aid budgets in recent years.
The International Rescue Committee said it had been forced to reduce its health and preparedness work in Ituri province in the northeastern corner of the DRC, the epicenter of the outbreak, after the funding cuts.
“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” said Heather Reoch Kerr, the rescue committee’s Congo country director. “The sharp rise in reported cases over the last few days reflects the reality that surveillance systems are now catching up with transmission, [which] has likely been occurring for some time.”
Earlier this week, Oxfam also lambasted countries for the funding cuts. Oxfam’s country director in Congo, Manenji Mangundu, said that “aid cuts left DRC effectively blind to Ebola.”
Asked to comment on the impact these cuts have had on the ability of countries in the region to respond to the outbreak, Tedros was diplomatic. “We don’t need to jump into conclusions,” he said, adding that the funding situation would be assessed properly to “learn for the future.”
The U.S., however, says it’s still ready to help.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in an emailed statement that “it is false to claim that the [USAID] reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola.”
He argued that bringing the now-defunct agency’s global health functions into the Global Health Security Bureau at the State Department makes the U.S. government’s efforts to respond “more aligned and effective.”
“Funding and support to combat Ebola continue, working with allies and partners,” he said.
The department said Tuesday that it will fund the establishment of up to 50 treatment clinics and associated efforts to treat Ebola in Congo and Uganda, highlighting America’s “ironclad commitment” to a fully-resourced and rapid response with key global health and humanitarian partners.
Both the U.S. and Europe have sent an expert to the African disease agency, and have offered further specialists if needed. During a meeting of EU health ministers and disease agencies on Tuesday, the European Medicines Agency said it’s working with the WHO to identify potential drugs and vaccines to study.
There is one promising vaccine candidate for Bundibugyo, which is similar to Merck’s Ervebo and is designed for the more common Zaire ebolavirus, the WHO told reporters Wednesday.
But it could take six to nine months to obtain doses for human testing, WHO expert Vasee Moorthy said. Another option developed by AstraZeneca and India’s Serum Institute could be ready for trial in two to three months but lacks any animal data to support it, he added. ]]>