The World Prepared for Ebola. Just Not This Ebola.

*Governments and drugmakers spent years building Ebola defenses after the 2014 crisis. A rare strain now spreading in Congo is exposing their limits.*

*Jason Gale for Bloomberg News*

More than a decade after surviving Ebola, Craig Spencer still thinks about the isolation ward at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

The emergency physician became New York City’s first — and only — Ebola patient in 2014 after returning from Guinea, where he treated people during the West Africa epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people and reached London, Dallas and several other major cities around the world. Officials closed a Brooklyn bowling alley he had visited and traced subway contacts across Manhattan as fear spread through the city, though no secondary infections were detected.

This week, another American doctor brought those memories rushing back. A missionary surgeon who caught Ebola in eastern Congo was evacuated to Germany, reviving fears over a virus the world has spent years trying to tame.

“What’s it like to have Ebola?” Spencer says people still ask him. “It sucks. What do you want me to say?”

For Spencer, now an associate professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health, the latest outbreak is unsettling for another reason. The culprit is the rare Bundibugyo strain — a form of Ebola with no approved vaccine or antibody treatment.

That has exposed an uncomfortable truth a decade after the West Africa epidemic triggered a revolution in global preparedness. Governments, drugmakers and health agencies spent years developing vaccines, rapid diagnostic tests, surveillance systems and emergency-response plans. Yet the epidemic now unfolding in eastern Congo suggests many of those gains were built around defending against the Zaire strain — the deadliest and most common form of Ebola — rather than preparing sufficiently for other types.

[Read the full essay here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-05-22/how-years-of-ebola-preparation-left-congo-uganda-unprepared-for-bundibugyo?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTQ3MjEwMSwiZXhwIjoxNzgwMDc2OTAxLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURkZHVTJLR0lGU1cwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.0eo6UTRbe-0M_ekNSsOTGoiNl9Vm59ggJQOjwth8O-c)

We’re not getting fooled twice