Jane Halton was in the room with the world’s top health chiefs as the World Health Organisation rang its most serious alarm about the Ebola outbreak.
Those gathered on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly in Geneva included WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had just declared the spreading sickness in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a public health emergency of international concern.
His phone kept buzzing.
Jane Halton at her home in Canberra in 2020. Dominic Lorrimer “Terribly, in the course of that meeting, Tedros was getting text messages from WHO people on the ground who were actually being fired on in their tent,” Halton recalled of the May meeting. “It’s a very dangerous part of the world.”
Halton ran the Australian Health Department as secretary between 2002 and 2014, and was enmeshed with Australia’s pandemic response while serving on the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission.
Her remit expanded worldwide when she became chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). It’s a pandemic-busting alliance of government bodies, scientific outfits and civil organisations formed in the aftermath of the largest ever Ebola outbreak, which began in 2014. The viral haemorrhagic fever then infected 28,600 people and killed 11,325 across West Africa.
A patient prepares to have blood drawn for a test in Mongbwalu, Ituri province, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, last month. Getty Images
A health worker crouches beside the coffin of a suspected Ebola victim during safe burial procedures outside a family home in Mongbwalu last month. Getty Images
A protester raises a Kenyan flag near a burning barricade on June 1, during a demonstration against a proposed Ebola quarantine centre to be established by the US at Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki, Kenya. AP The current outbreak, some experts fear , could rival that disaster. There have been 569 confirmed cases and 103 deaths as of June 7 across the DRC and Uganda. Modelling shows that the actual case number could be double that . WHO chief Tedros warned last week that the disease may have festered for four months, spreading through bodily fluids including blood, vomit and semen, before the outbreak was announced on May 15.
The region was ambushed by a rare strain of the Bundibugyo virus with no vaccine or treatment. Amid it all, bullets fly between warring militias, and misinformation adds to the violence. Medical tents have been torched by grieving family members of the dead who do not believe the virus killed their loved ones.
Last week, a group of young men stormed a hospital in eastern Congo to seize the bodies of two relatives. During the chaos, CNN reported , 18 suspected Ebola patients left the facility and disappeared.
These are nightmare conditions for disease containment. But CEPI has just poured $87 million into three possible weapons against the disease – a shot in the arm for three Bundibugyo vaccine candidates in early stages of development.
It’s a scattergun strategy that paid dividends during the last pandemic. “During COVID, CEPI had investments in 14 vaccine candidates, of which seven got to some form of licensure,” Halton says. “I describe this as the ‘many shots on goal’ approach.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the situation “is not without hope”, as the strain can be survived with good medical care. AP
A health worker walks past Ebola warning and instruction posters at a temporary health clinic at the Mpondwe border crossing linking Uganda and the DRC on June 4. AP
Health workers suit up during an Ebola outbreak in the mining town of Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on May 25, 2026. The New York Times CEPI has become a cornerstone of the world’s response to deadly new pathogens. The non-profit foundation, partly funded by Australia, finances science aimed at crafting new countermeasures to emerging diseases in a pandemic-prone world .
It also runs disease control war games with laboratories and governments. In one such exercise, for example, it set a University of Queensland lab the challenge of crafting a vaccine for a bloody, deadly virus spread by the pygmy rice rat in 150 days.
There was no actual outbreak to address, but the hypothetical challenge was aimed at honing the world’s ability to rapidly craft new vaccines. Some practice drills, however, have proved eerily prescient.
CEPI ran an exercise involving the Rwandan government in September 2024. It laid out a fictional scenario of a young abattoir worker who falls sick with fever, joint pain and headaches. Three of his healthcare workers become infected with the mystery illness, and one dies. How should the government respond?
For this scenario, it was decided last minute that the disease should be Marburg, a haemorrhagic fever. The exercise helped health authorities to iron out their outbreak response plan and identify bottlenecks that could strangle rapid disease control.
Health worker…
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