Global Health Emergency, Global Moral Failure: Ebola’s Return in DR Congo -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Once again the world has learnt to panic, only too late. Its official language, clinical as Ebola tears through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo: suspected cases, confirmed infections, emergency activation and cross-border surveillance But beneath this bureaucratic jargon lurks a far uglier truth. This is not just a disease outbreak what transpiring in DR Congo. It is a collapse that is moral and political revealing once again how global health systems still do not provide for those they promise to protect.

The numbers released alone should have crushed complacency. In the East, over 1,077 suspected cases and patient confinements have already happened along with reports of confirming infections of 1211 people and suspicious incidents deaths among which many are alive at the Kalutara Hospital today where crowded only by few families. This outbreak, caused by the uncommon strain of Ebola typing named Bundibugyo virus is especially concerning because there are no factory-made vaccine or targeted therapy for this type. But the scandal is not just that science has its limits. The big scandal is that we constructed a global health architecture professing to focus on preparedness, equity and rapid response paradigm architectures for the next emergency event but rendering some of the most vulnerable population functionally unprotected.

The international system loves a good lesson learned. When you were given the chance to glide and knew that COVID-19 was coming, when previous Ebola outbreaks had led global leaders around past summits and shouts of never being left wing again, they announced globally. But preparedness for whom? Certainly not for Congolese families caught within a war-scarred area that the armed violence precludes any access to health care, and where burial protocols are hounded because no one trusts authorities anymore, or even sometimes in desperate communities sees such interventions as some new form of imposition from on high rather than lifesaving rescue.

This is the essence of global health governance hypocrisy: it treats outbreaks in fragile states as technical crises, rather than inseparable from histories of abandonment and exploitation along with insecurity. You can’t bomb, neglect and underinvest in a place for decades then show amazement when health measures happen to fail at the precise moment they’re needed most. Let’s not forget that Ebola is spreading in a vacuum. It is flowing over battlefields, through water-crattered concrete and ruptured agricultural land; on a tide of shattered civil institutions that are never going to pull together again in marker-pen-in-hand unity; it has galloped past the viscera-shredding shrieks crescendo’d to death by desperation as conditions worsen against all rational indications time and again.

That two thirds of the centers for emergency treatment were said to have been set on fire should not be interpreted merely as blind opposition. It ought to be interpreted as a desperately disappointing indication that the universality of legitimacy is breaking. Public health does not flourish where trust has been methodically stripped away. Local credibility, community consent and a physical security presence on the ground cannot be replaced by any Geneva launched emergency declaration. And regardless of how the international press releases are framed, here too declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern soon becomes an act more theatrical urgency than there as protective guarantee.

The world shows us where its moral priorities lie by the timing of its urgencies. The suffering in the Congo is bearable to global power, until its contagion threatens to travel. Concern is only stirred when Uganda gets hit; travel bans start circulating, the prospect for wider regional or international spread emerges. This is not solidarity. Humanitarianism in disguise, self-interested containment.

This raises obvious questions if there is no approved vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain, how could we allow ourselves to be so vulnerable? Rare does not mean irrelevant. It means neglected. The endemic diseases of problematized populations those most systematically affecting impoverished, conflict-affected African victims  are routinely treated as episodes in human tragedy and not institutional legacies both at funders; (including philanthropic foundations) but also a research apparatus fueled by market value and geopolitical visibility. The scandalous inequity in global health innovation continues: profit is uncertain and the victims politically peripheral, so urgency melts away.

That indifference from the international community is now being repaid in blood by DR Congo. This outbreak ought to induce an uncomfortable reckoning. No point in a health emergency getting released worldwide if it activates press releases faster than protection, If it fails to defend conflict zones, then preparedness is a fraud. If vaccine gaps remain predictable, preventable, and tolerated then equity is propaganda. If Congo has to again stand at the front line of a deadly outbreak and without all the tools, trust & security it needs in order to contain one then international health governance is morally bankrupt.

The resurgence of Ebola in DR Congo is more than a medical emergency. It is evidence. This is evidence that the world still values some lives less than others, defends certain borders more fiercely and confuses declarations with justice. Until then, every new epidemic will lay bare the same disgusting truth: The real pandemic is not just viral. It is global indifference.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka
Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia