I led the UK’s military response to Ebola in 2015. I fear what happens this time

When I led Britain’s military response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2015, the virus had already overrun three capital cities. By the time the crisis ended, it had infected more than 28,000 people across Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, and killed over 11,000.

Britain, France and the United States each deployed military forces to a regional epidemic that, by the point of our intervention, had become a major strategic crisis. We were not there as humanitarians. We were there because a virus had moved faster than every system designed to detect it, and the risk of it crossing our borders, and killing our citizens, was too high to ignore.

It was a race against the clock, battling a virus that threatened the world, while navigating the reality of failed public health systems.

The government-run treatment centre in Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown was a catastrophe. The sick and dying were simply dumped in rooms without beds, adequate care or sanitation, and anyone – whether sick or not – could walk freely in and out.

We quarantined whole areas of Freetown. We searched for the sick, even as terrified people tried to hide from us. It was not hard to blame them – ambulances until then took people to their deaths, not to save them. We set up protocols, emergency hospitals with the correct care and safe burial sites to prevent further contamination.

Yet, it is happening again. On 17 May, the World Health Organisation declared a public health emergency of international concern over a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. By the time the WHO acted, cases had been accumulating undetected for weeks. The virus had reached the capital cities, both served by international airports.

When the first samples were sent for testing, the field equipment available could only detect the Zaire strain. It could not detect the Bundibugyo strain that was actually circulating. There is no licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo. This is precisely the failure mode I watched play out in Sierra Leone a decade ago.

I came back from Sierra Leone convinced that pandemic disease belonged on the national security register alongside terrorism, and that protecting citizens from it was no less a core function of government than preventing a foreign army’s invasion.

As a former British Army major general with tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia I do not say that lightly.

The argument many of us were making in those years was specific. To avoid the slow, expensive, improvised response we had been forced into during that first Ebola outbreak, the world needed money raised in advance, governed multilaterally and spent on the unglamorous infrastructure of surveillance, laboratories and trained health workers.

Pandemic preparedness, we argued, deserved the same seriousness of funding the West had given to counterterrorism after 9/11.

A fund, spent in the right places before the next outbreak began, would be the world’s first line of defence. I was not the only person saying this.

After Covid-19 paralysed the global economy in 2020, the argument was too overwhelming to ignore.

In 2022, the Pandemic Fund was created to do just that. Housed at the World Bank and with a mandate from the G20, Britain joined as a sovereign investor. The fund has since disbursed $885m in grants across 75 countries and mobilised a further $6bn in co-financing for laboratory networks in low-income states, for the training of community health workers and for cross-border surveillance systems that catch outbreaks while they are still containable.

But on 19 March this year, Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, announced that the UK would end its contribution to the Pandemic Fund, alongside its funding for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The rationale given was the need to prioritise “the most-effective investments”. Just eight weeks later, the WHO declared the current emergency.

This most recent outbreak of cases existed but the means to spot them in time did not. By the time the world understood what it was dealing with, the virus was already in two capital cities, exactly as before. We are running the same failed experiment a second time.

The case for pandemic preparedness is not a humanitarian one, although it must also be that when human lives are at stake. It is primarily a strategic one.

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed approximately 100 million people, around 5 per cent of the global population, more than all the dead of the First World War.

The 2003 Sars outbreak killed fewer than 800 people but cost the global economy some $40bn.

Covid-19 cost more than 200,000 lives in the UK alone and cost the British Exchequer in the region of £400bn.

The Pandemic Fund’s grants total a small fraction of any of those figures. The UK’s share of the fund was smaller still. There is no version of the maths in which exiting that fund constitutes a saving.

Nor is there a version in which Britain is insulated from an Ebola outbreak. Heathrow handled 84 million passengers last year. A pathogen that reaches Kinshasa or Kampala reaches London within 48 hours. The geographical barriers that might once have prevented a regional epidemic from becoming a global pandemic are long gone.

There are an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 unknown viruses carried by birds and mammals on this planet. We do not get to choose which one moves next, or from where.

The Foreign Secretary has not been asked to do anything unprecedented. The Pandemic Fund already exists. Its mandate is settled. Its governance is in place. The UK’s contribution is small, in fiscal terms, against the scale of the threat it is designed to address. As Ebola once more threatens the world, it is difficult to see what a defensible counter-argument to restoring Britain’s contribution would be.

Plagues no longer take us by surprise. We know which pathogens to look for. We know which countries lack the laboratories and trained staff to find them in time. And we know which institutional vehicle exists to fund that capacity, because we built it.

Without action now, more people will die, and our global security will continue to be threatened.

Charlie Herbert is a former major general in the British Army. He led the UK military response to the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2015.