Case of Ebola: Is Uganda Prepared for Biological Warfare?

In mid-2022, a senior Ugandan official travelled to a western country for a workshop.

The official, whose name we will keep anonymous for privacy reasons, found his hosts analysing confidential demographic health information obtained from Uganda. 

“How did you get this information?” the Ugandan official casually asked, adding, “This information belongs solely to the government of Uganda.”

The official did not obtain a convincing answer from his hosts. 

He, however, realised that his hosts, who had participated in a joint health study in Uganda, had taken the information back home.  

On returning to Uganda, the official contacted colleagues at the Health Ministry to relay the information and warn them against the dangers of sharing very confidential health information with foreigners.

Since then, Uganda has been keen on sharing samples of viral outbreaks in Uganda. 

Uganda now fears that these samples, which have always been taken to foreign labs for further studies, could be modified and improved to be used as bioweapons. 

For example, when the first case of Ebola was confirmed in Mubende district on September 20, 2022, western countries quickly raised millions of dollars to fight the epidemic.

However, the better part of these funds went to western-backed organisations operating in Uganda. 

About $5.5 million was allocated to Baylor Uganda to fund contact tracing, alert management, and training laboratory staff on infection prevention and control.

Another $3.8 million was allocated to the Infectious Disease Institute (IDI) to offer emergency medical services and support dignified burials whereas $6.4 million was offered to UN agencies such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF for coordination, waste management, supporting survivors, and community engagement among others. 

This gave these organisations unhindered access to Ebola samples and kept the Ugandan government on the periphery of countering the Ebola crisis. 

The Resident District Commissioners (RDCs) in Mubende and neighbouring areas alerted the Ministry of Health and security agencies that some western organizations were picking Ebola samples from people.

Government responded by launching an internal investigation which showed that the foreign organisations were indeed conducting its laboratory tests for their own research without informing the Ministry of Health.

Even at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), the western organisations had their technical personnel working independently from the government structures.

Minister Aceng moved in and stopped the unauthorised U.S.-led operation especially collecting data and picking multiple samples from people.

Aceng also wondered why development partners did not allocate money directly to her team to implement control activities against Ebola. 

In her statement to Parliament, the minister said that since the beginning of the outbreak, no funding had been provided to support the response of the ministry, despite a clear response plan. 

“Partners usually inquire about government input before they declare their resources,” said Aceng.

“We are seeing partners declaring resources mobilised on social media, which resources we do not have information about,” she added.

In response, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Uganda, Natalie Brown, said, “Our partners (NGOs) here are located nationwide, and they have contacts on the ground… But I think a very real concern, and I think every Ugandan shares this, is the issue of corruption in Uganda.”

Insiders say the government is quietly taking steps to ensure it is not kept on the periphery in dealing with such epidemics in the future as critical information could land in wrong hands.  

Bio terrorism?

The continuous outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Africa have alarmed global health experts because of the disease’s increasing appearance in Central and East Africa. 

The greater frequency with which Ebola is appearing raises questions about human accessibility to the virus and human usage of the virus for harmful purposes. 

Kenneth Bwambale, a public health expert, says the increase in natural outbreaks in the region, coupled with the possibility of wrong groups recruiting experts to acquire the virus and prepare it to use as a bioweapon, should lead Ugandan policymakers to be more alert to the dangers of biological warfare. 

“The potential for some groups to obtain Ebola in the field; the lack of political capacity in the region and global will to develop a vaccine; and the pathogen’s natural occurrence in the region is alarming,” said Bwambale. 

In 2014, the Scientific American quoted the then U.S. director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, saying Ebola could be weaponized by taking large quantities of it and inserting them into a small “bomblet” that, once detonated, would spray the virus perhaps 30 feet—potentially infecting people as it landed on their faces, on cuts or on hands that they might then touch their eyes with. 

“That would be like a hundred people simultaneously touching an Ebola-infected person,” Fauci told the U.S. Congress in 2014. 

The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo—infamous for setting off sarin gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995—also looked into Ebola as a potential biological weapon. 

In 1992, they sent a medical group of 40 people ostensibly to help provide aid during an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Their real purpose, however, was to collect some Ebola virus, as Amy Smithson, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, noted in her 2000 report Ataxia. 

Resurgence of Polio in Africa

Research shows that Ebola can be used as a successful bioterrorism agent. 

While technologically advanced medical-disease surveillance measures can detect a possible natural outbreak, if the Ebola virus were deliberately introduced into a densely populated city, the outcome would be disastrous.

The ease of production and the broad availability of biological agents and technical know-how have led to a further spread of biological weapons and an increased desire among nations as well as terrorists to have them. 

Moreso, the past decade saw global actors moving closer than ever to celebrating the complete eradication of polio, with only two states still classified as polio-endemic: Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

This made the resurgence of polio in Nigeria in 2016 a massive shock globally, prompting the urgent need for reassessment amid fears of it spreading to other African states. 

COVID-19

In an entirely unprecedented turn of events, the field of global health has been thrown to the forefront of the world’s agenda after the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, which spread to become a global pandemic in early 2020. 

Known as COVID-19, the virus has left few states unscathed, with global cases surpassing 141 million and deaths standing at over three million, but the scope of the devastation goes beyond mortality. 

Economies have been demobilised, health care facilities are overwhelmed, unemployment has spiked, and borders have tightened. It is in these contexts of disease, disruption, and fragility that the wrong groups can thrive.

Experts have suggested that the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic may see an increased use of bioweapons after seeing the potential for mass disruption and destruction, calling upon public health authorities to remain vigilant.