Mistrusting the process: containing Congo’s Ebola outbreak

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1:13The Economist

1:19Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:29Today on the show, how Europe is trying to wean itself off American tech and the resurgent phenomenon that is the sticky toffee pudding.

1:43First up, though.

1:55In the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, attempts to control a worrisome outbreak of Ebola are being hampered by the very people they're meant to help. Medical tents on fire, burned-out beds, the sporadic warning shots of police.

2:13Health officials know that safely burying Ebola victims is crucial. Contact with bodies can spread the disease further. But local custom often has it that community members ritually wash the dead. And more to the point, they don't trust the warnings that authorities are giving them. And so you get scenes like this in Rampara with fights over a burial. Arson and protest met with tear gas.

2:42It's just one of the dynamics that's complicating a crucial response. The world faces a huge task to combat the latest Ebola outbreak. John McDermott is our chief Africa correspondent. There is no vaccine for this strain, and the on-the-ground realities make tackling it incredibly difficult. So there's a growing recognition that both in Congo, where the outbreak is centered, and in the rest of the region, everyone is playing catch-up. And before we talk about the challenges that you mentioned, just give us a sense of what the current state of the outbreak is. All the numbers going around about this outbreak need to be treated with some caution, and that's precisely because the virus has almost certainly been circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo for at least a couple of months before it was detected.

3:38Officially, the Congolese authorities reckon there are more than a thousand suspected cases and about 250 deaths, mostly in the province of Eturi. But firstly, those numbers are likely to be underestimates because of a shortage of testing capacity. And secondly, and most worryingly, we are seeing signs of spread to other parts of the region. A couple of other Congolese provinces, South Kivu and North Kivu have detected suspected cases. Uganda has had several cases as well, and experts are almost certain there will be cases in South Sudan, which is another country neighboring Eturi. At the same time, we shouldn't become overly hysterical that this is about to turn into a global pandemic.

4:30There have been some potential reports of cases being imported by Congolese travelers to, for example, Brazil. Although, as I speak to you now, those cases have not been confirmed. The center of the crisis remains the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the surrounding countries. Now, you said that realities on the ground are making matters tougher. What do you mean by that? It is just hard to imagine a more difficult place to deal with an Ebola outbreak than Eturi, this province in the east of the DRC. It is desperately poor. There are a lot of refugees. There is widespread conflict involving a plethora of militia, including one that has links to Islamic State.

5:19And there is so little trust in the state and almost any institution that represents authority. And this means that when medics are trying to offer help, there's often quite a rational response, which is, well, who are you to say you are helping me? Who are you to say that you can protect me? Action Aid NGO did a survey of some of the health areas it works in in Eturi, and it found that a third of people do not believe that Ebola is real. And I'm also picking up from my sources there that there is a lingering sense from previous Ebola outbreaks that when people pitch up offering help, they're perceived to be trying to feather their own nest, as if the Congolese government or international NGOs are doing it to make money as opposed to help them.

6:16So as well as some of the operational issues that they have to deal with in the province, such as setting up isolation tents, you have this intangible challenge as well, which is building the trust of the local population. And that feeds into what you spoke about last time on the show about this outbreak, this institutional immune system. That is certainly one part of it, just getting trust on the ground. That's right. The institutional immune system, as I called it, is our protection against epidemics emerging and then our protection to stop them spreading too far. And you can think of that system operating in three locations.

6:56There's the field, there's the offices of politicians, and then there's the lab. So if we start with the field, stopping Ebola at source requires a number of logistical things to happen at the same time. You need to test and monitor these cases. You need to have labs that can confirm results as soon as possible. You need to isolate patients, you need to manage them, you need to track their contacts as well. Of course, as I just mentioned, you also need to build the trust and support of local communities who are deeply distrustful of authority. And while there has clearly been a lot of work going on, as I was speaking to people over the weekend, some of them were literally involved in the construction of isolation tents for NGOs like MSF, there's no doubt that everyone on the ground in Etruri and neighbouring areas would say they are playing catch-up and the response has had a very slow start.

7:51So that's the fields. In what way does the institutional immune system involve politicians' offices? Well, it seems like Western politicians have belatedly woken up to the scale of the outbreak in Eastern DRC. And we've seen over the past few days, Britain, the European Union, and the United States announce new funding in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more, and that will help pay for kit and health workers on the ground. But the most important political capital isn't London or Washington, it's actually Kinshasa, 2 ,000 kilometers away, and much will depend on the relationship between the central government in the DRC and those at a regional level.

8:36And over the years, to say the least, that relationship has been somewhat testy. So much will depend on whether the Congolese government can ensure that its authority on the ground can be imposed as well. And lastly, you mentioned the lab as one of the fronts here. After the massive outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which began in 2014, scientists began working on vaccines for the most common strain of the virus known as Zaire and that has helped health workers essentially ring fence Ebola outbreaks when they've happened. Unfortunately this particular outbreak has a different strain the Bundabujo strain and there is as yet no licensed vaccine for it but as we saw during the COVID pandemic scientists have become much better at moving at warp speed to develop vaccines.

9:29And last week, there was an announcement by Oxford University and India's Serum Institute that they were trying to develop a new experimental version of a vaccine which may work against this particular strain. But they also cautioned that this is untested even on animals. So at best, we're talking two or three months before that is in vials ready to ship. So clearly still some challenges on the ground, as you say, but progress, at least in the minds of politicians and funders and some movement in the lab. Does it all come together in time or does this get far worse before it gets better? It gets worse before it gets better.

10:09But I think with Ebola, it's important to keep some perspective as hard as that may be. It's a virus that causes some hysteria in some places. It is clearly the most concerning outbreak in Africa since at least 2018, if not 2014. And many hundreds, if not thousands of people are likely to die. But that number can be kept down if the field operations can be surged, if politicians get their act together, and hopefully if scientists can work the miracles as well. So we're playing catch up, but it's not too late to limit this somewhat. John, thanks very much for joining us again. Thank you, Jason.

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11:42Germany's federal government pays almost half a billion euros each year in license fees to Microsoft. An association of French businesses reckons that big companies there buy more than$50 billion of American software and cloud services every year. But the truth is, it's not the bank statements that are making Europe's businesses and governments queasy about all that reliance. Europe is trying to escape the lock-in of American tech giants. Christian Odendahl is our European economics editor. But with AI, the grip of American tech is, if anything, growing tighter. When you say Europe's trying to escape, how so?

12:23What are European governments and companies doing? On June 3rd and current plans, the EU will unveil a package which is called a tech sovereignty package. So that includes Cloud and AI Development Act to have more of that capacity in Europe. France is switching all government computers from Windows to Linux, which is an originally Europe-based operating system. Germany's intelligence service has just opted for a French data analytics form over America's Palantir. And you could see that the firm's insensitive sectors, such as defense or health or finance, that they are the most concerned about technological sovereignty.

13:02But what is the nature of the concern? So there are a couple of worries. I think the first one is about sensitive data and sensitive services, that they may no longer be as safe as previously thought. So for example, the American Cloud Act gives governments the power to request data from tech firms, even if that data is stored in Europe or even by a subsidiary. There was a leaked report by experts that argued against using Palantir, in part because the experts from the Swiss army feared that Switzerland may be dependent on specialized staff from the service provider. And then there's also the concern that America may wield this as a geopolitical weapon in the future in the form of a kill switch that can just turn off services.

13:45And that fear is probably exaggerated. But as one expert said, it's a useful political framing device to make sure that people understand and are aware of what is essentially a much more complex issue of dependency. But it's not completely unfounded. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for example, Karim Khan, lost his email access after being sanctioned by America. But American providers seeing all of these governments and businesses heading for the door must be doing something to calm their fears. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Europe is a big market for them. So Microsoft, for example, is promising European users never to cut them off and to fight American data requests in court.

14:25All big cloud providers now have some kind of sovereign service that they offer. Google even has an air-gapped cloud service with no connection to the public internet for customers with very high security needs, such as the German armed forces that, according to press reports, have opted for that particular cloud. Critics say, well, this is basically sovereign washing because at the end of the day, ultimately, these American firms remain under American control. So ultimately, then, this all boils down to just a security concern, even more perhaps than a sovereignty one. There is a longer standing issue about digital services spreading harmful content and misinformation.

15:00And it's about regulating social media, right? And the arrival of AI has intensified that concern because there is another potentially much more powerful digital service largely in the hands of American firms. Now, Europe has already developed countermeasures. The Digital Markets Act let the EU punish anti-competitive behaviors by these big platforms. And there's a Digital Services Act, which can force American firms to adjust their services if it's found that they facilitate harmful content, for example. Even though it may give European providers a bit more room, from the experience so far, it seems that it's really unlikely to make Europe much less dependent on America.

15:42So perhaps the simpler answer is to switch to European providers. You suggested earlier that plenty of governments are doing so. That's right. And it's related to a third concern, which is about European growth. The fear here is that Europe is losing the technological race against America and China. And that includes artificial intelligence, which is also reaching into many sectors where Europe is still strong, such as industry. And this is why, together with the security aspects mentioned before, that many would like to have European providers just to stay competitive in this technological race as well.

16:17One question there is how easy it is for users to switch. Hyperscalers provide these integrated services and the scale necessary to make them efficient. But that also creates a lock-in effect that is really hard for businesses in particular who really need to remain competitive to switch to a different provider. Also in part because their customers are also using the same providers and that creates synergies there too. And then there's of course the quality and the cost. A survey of Danish firms, Danish firms use clouds the most across Europe, found that their top concerns, besides security and legal compliance, were the quality and the ease of use and the price.

16:55So it's really hard to see European firms switch to different providers purely for the aspect of sovereignty because they need to stay competitive. So the question is whether Europe actually can catch up either through innovation or regulation, I suppose, here. What do you make of that prospect? It's difficult. I mean, there is this demand for more sovereignty, but at the same time, building an entire tech ecosystem from the ground up is extremely difficult. And that is sort of the entire ecosystem from the chip making and the data centers and the software and the integrated services and so forth.

17:31And at the same time, in America, there's a very strong economic dynamic in building these technologies, which Europe will never be able to match. Christian, thanks very much for your time. Thank you very much, Jason.

17:57That is so lush. That is so wonderful. My ex-co-host, Orey Ogunbiyi, recently sent me to Hawksmoor, a restaurant in London, to try a famous British dessert. So this is just a dessert station? Just a dessert. Right. So all the desserts we make fresh now. Peter Woods, the group's development chef, took us to where the magic happens. We have our sticky toffee puddings, which we're just going to finish off. So these are basically, we make them up in batches. Right. So with our dark and light muscovado sugar, we've got eggs in there, some beautiful medial dates that we boiled, the water-moving bicarbonate soda.

18:33It's a pretty rich, hearty thing. I've got to say, it's probably my favorite British dessert. Sauce, sauce, and more sauce. Sauce, more, it's all about the sauce. You can never have enough sauce. What's in the sauce? So the sauce, again, light and dark muscovada sugar, butter, equal amounts of butter.

18:51Ora, I know this might be painful for you because you might have liked to be there to try one of these.

18:55Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Jason, I am bitterly disappointed. I don't have the words. I'm really upset to have missed this very crucial moment, this groundbreaking journalism that you got to do without me.

19:11Ah, but that I did because of you, because you have been looking into the phenomenon that is the sticky toffee pudding.

19:18Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Yes, exactly. The sticky toffee pudding is seen as a traditional British meal, but I found it quite interesting. It actually has a mix of non-British influences, and its origins are a little bit controversial, or contested at least. There's a guy called Francis Coulson, who is credited with its invention in the 1970s, But then there's a hotel down the road in the Lake District that says that they popularized the Sticky Toffee Pudding. So regardless of who did, it did become a pub staple by about the 1990s and also pretty popular on school dinner menus probably in the decade afterwards. Okay, so that's still in the distant past.

19:52Why are we talking about it now?

19:54Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:So there's this TikToker called the STP guy. He calls himself the STP guy. And he's made these really quirky videos. They've got hundreds of thousands of views, and they've stirred up new interest in sticky toffee puddings across the world. I've just reviewed my 61st sticky toffee pudding. But the big question is, what did it get out of 10? This STP was from the... He rated Hawksmoor's STP, so the one that you tried, as the best in London. And I thought if I couldn't come and try it myself, I might as well ask you very nicely to go and do it for me. That is very selfless of you, and I couldn't be more grateful because it was great.

20:29But in your hunting, you found far less traditional versions of these things than the one I tried at Hawksmoor, where they are really sticking to the old school.

20:37Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Yeah, exactly. People are getting really creative with sticky toffee puddings and pushing the boundaries on sticky and toffee. One Australian cookbook writer, for example, suggested adding miso to get a little bit of umami flavor in there. There's a New York chef who adds a cocoa foillotine crumble for crunch. There's another one who adds a green apple sorbet to a sticky toffee pudding. Others try and make it healthy. You've got Jamie Oliver, the British chef, who suggests yogurt instead of having cream or ice cream or custard with the sticky toffee pudding. You've got the Jim Bros saying switch double cream for almond milk or protein powder or just add an extra egg.

21:17Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:It's turned into a bit of a wild, wild west, Jason. You sound a little dubious about these strayings from the traditional. I just feel like if it's perfect already, why add all these funky bits? Just leave it as it is. No, in truth, Chef Peter told me exactly the same thing. In my view, it doesn't need it. I think when you have a great product to start with, you don't need the additions to go with it. I don't mean to keep stressing this and making you more and more envious, Ori, but it was indeed pretty damned good. If you are trying to tempt me to come back to London, it might be working. With great gratitude and a little bit of sadness for you, Ori, thanks very much for your time.