Senior Adviser to the Brown Pandemic Center, Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health
Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron is a Professor of the Practice and Senior Advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. She also is a Practitioner Senior Fellow of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Cameron is a global leader in health security and biodefense. She has served for over two decades, within and outside of government, to facilitate change. She spent two tours on the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff, twice helping establish and lead the NSC Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense. In this role she built and led a robust team focused, every day, on leaning forward to prevent, detect, and rapidly respond to biological crises. oversaw U.S. global COVID-19 response efforts and was instrumental in developing and launching the Global Health Security Agenda and addressed homeland and national security threats surrounding biosecurity and biosafety, biodefense, emerging infectious disease threats, biological select agents and toxins, dual‐use research, and bioterrorism. She was a senior advisor for global health security at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She served on the Biden-Harris transition team.
Dr. Cameron has held senior posts at the Departments of State and Defense, where she created and oversaw biological and chemical security efforts. From 2010‐2013, she served as office director for Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) and senior advisor for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs. In this role, she oversaw the implementation of the geographic expansion of the Nunn‐Lugar CTR program. For her work, she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service. From 2003‐2010 Beth oversaw the expansion of Department of State Global Threat Reduction programs and supported the expansion and extension of the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, a multilateral framework to improve global CBRN security.
Outside of government, Dr. Cameron was the Vice President for Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and architect of NTI | bio, a program aimed at countering biological catastrophes. There she helped lead the development of the first Global Health Security Index and worked to build international consensus to launch a new global organization geared at improving biosafety and biosecurity,
Dr. Cameron got her start in government as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow in the health policy office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy where she worked on the Patients’ Bill of Rights, medical privacy, and legislation to improve the quality of cancer care. From 2001‐2003, she also served as a manager of policy research for the American Cancer Society
Dr. Cameron holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the Human Genetics and Molecular Biology Program at Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Biology from the University of Virginia. Cameron is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On April 1, the Trump administration began making sweeping changes to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by firing thousands of staff, some of whom learned of this decision when they arrived at work on Tuesday morning and were not allowed to enter the building. According to HHS, the administration plans to reduce the HHS workforce from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000. It is also consolidating the current 28 divisions into 15 divisions, and eliminating five of the 10 regional offices in the United States, among other changes.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed these changes as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, citing recent declines in life expectancy, while neglecting to mention that those declines were largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration’s stated goals are to streamline HHS, save taxpayer money, focus more on chronic illness, and make HHS more responsive and efficient. It claims it can make these reforms without impacting critical services. In practice, however, the administration has cut essential funding that was helping states and cities prepare for outbreaks; reassigned leaders who were stopping biological threats in other countries from spreading; undermined the United States’ ability to quickly review and approve treatments and vaccines during an emergency; and disrupted essential work to create vaccines, tests, and treatments for dangerous diseases. These approaches do not make America healthy. They make America less safe.
Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron, Professor, Brown University, and former senior official in global health security and biodefense at the White House and USAID, kindly shares her thoughts on the radical changes unfolding inside the U.S. government surrounding biothreats. Two internal factions within the Trump administration vie with one another. “It’s a bleak picture” in the accumulating damage to the federal workforce, programs, and the protective shield inside and outside our borders. Elon Musk alleges USAID is producing bioweapons, a patent lie. “It’s preposterous” and “dangerous.” More responsibilities will now fall to governors. What to make of the Trump administration’s recent $1B announcement on H5N1 to assist the poultry industry, and its decision to revisit the $590m contract with Moderna for a mRNA human vaccine for H5N1? We don’t know much on what is going to happen in Congress and DOD. And when emergency crises will strike next. Where to find hope? Our civil servants.
Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service "accidentally canceled" efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola — but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored.
"We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly," Musk said at a meeting of President Donald Trump's Cabinet officials, defending his group's fast-moving approach to canceling federal programs in a bid for cost savings. "So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption."
Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID's Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID's own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
"There have been no efforts to 'turn on' anything in prevention" of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency's response to health-care outbreaks.
Last month's Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that's in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.
Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda's Ebola outbreak a "one-off," far diminished from "the full suite" of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.
"The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was," Bouri said.
Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri's assessment.
"There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online," said a current official. "USAID has been frozen: \staff and money."
"If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART," said one former official. "There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning."
The White House declined to comment on whether USAID's Ebola-response efforts had been fully restored.
"Uganda's Ebola outbreak occurred on the same day as the foreign aid freeze. Despite that, the waiver for assistance in addressing the outbreak was quickly reinstated," an administration official said in a statement.
The dustup over Ebola prevention represents the latest flash point as Democrats, current and former federal officials and others warn of the harms of DOGE's "move fast and break things" approach. A federal judge has repeatedly told the Trump administration to restore USAID funds, setting a deadline of Wednesday night to get money out the door again. Some Trump political officials have also grown weary of DOGE's approach, saying that the group's moves have created additional headaches for Cabinet departments.
Musk has defended his team's approach as a necessary strategy to overcome bureaucratic inertia and cut government spending.
"We do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026," Musk said Wednesday, as the entrepreneur addressed agency leaders. But he also acknowledged the need to preserve ongoing public health efforts. "I think we all want Ebola prevention," Musk said.
Ebola is a severe and often fatal virus that can cause fever, vomiting and internal and external bleeding, alarming global health leaders who have worked to contain several recent outbreaks. More than 11,000 people died in an Ebola epidemic in West Africa that began in 2014 and eventually spread to the United States. Symptoms and complications in survivors can also linger for months.
Public health experts said that there are risks in moving too quickly to dismantle the federal teams and programs fighting disease around the world, citing a mystery illness that has killed more than 50 people and is currently spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They also warned that the Trump administration is broadly weakening the nation's public health infrastructure domestically as well, citing initiatives that target funds and programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and other health agencies.
"U.S. investments in foreign aid, CDC surveillance and global health programs and in NIH-funded research are the front-line defense for the American public," said Paul Friedrichs, who oversaw the Biden administration's pandemic-preparedness efforts. "They also benefit people worldwide by reducing the risk of spread of a lethal disease like Ebola."
Beth Cameron, a senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, described the Trump administration's recent actions as "a double whammy" to global efforts to prevent Ebola, saying that USAID's "critical" functions to stop outbreaks abroad had been frozen or gutted.
"We have the programs and the people who were working on Ebola and other deadly-disease prevention capacity in other countries not able to do their jobs because their work is frozen, and many of the people have been put on administrative leave," said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. "And we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid."
Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's Ebola prevention efforts during the Obama administration, said he interpreted Musk's comments and the administration's recent Ebola efforts in the context of mounting criticism that DOGE had moved too quickly to cut public health efforts.
The Ebola response mounted by the Trump administration in Uganda was "more symbolic than substantive," Konyndyk said. "They know there's a political vulnerability."
Copyright WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post Feb 26, 2025
Learn the bipartisan lessons of the past to prevent future biological crises
For decades, American presidential administrations of both parties have made combatting biological threats a priority on their national security to-do list. In 2020, I spoke out about President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and dismissiveness towards bipartisan lessons and preparedness tools his team received when he entered office. Though no administration could have been perfectly prepared for COVID, the results of Trump’s disregard were predictable; when the virus struck, chaos ensued. Instead of uniting in the face of crisis, states and cities were left divided and competing for scarce resources. Americans suffered and lives were lost as a result.
Looking forward, important new plans and response playbooks have emerged not only from COVID-19, but from the many additional outbreaks the United States has fought over the last four years from mpox to H5N1 influenza, to Marburg. I draw hope from state and local innovations, such as those uncovered by the American Democracy and Health Security Initiative. The federal government and our nation’s governors, mayors, tribal leaders, school administrators, businesses and community organizations learned precious lessons, which must be preserved. The path ahead for our nation’s biodefense is clear: we must lean into and build on this vital work.
In this spirit, the administration should reject a biosecurity to-do list that sows divisiveness, driving Democrats and Republicans into their respective corners and failing to capitalize on hard-fought lessons from states, cities, and tribes. Instead, it should adopt a bipartisan biosecurity agenda that protects all Americans by onshoring and friend-shoring critical supplies, while simultaneously bolstering global financing solutions that enable low- and lower-middle-income countries to access countermeasures and stop outbreaks at the source. It should double down on investing in the 100 Days Mission, an effort built on Operation Warp Speed, achieve safe and effective vaccines, tests, and treatments for every potentially pandemic pathogen. And it must strengthen preparedness to deter and guard against the potential for deliberate or accidental biological misuse.
Such an agenda would recognize that biological disasters affect everyone, everywhere, all at once and that Americans can only be safe from disease threats if diseases are fought and stopped everywhere in the world. Crucially, this means doubling down on the US target to assist at least 50 countries with health security capacity and catalyze capacity in 50 more through a strong Pandemic Fund. It would require not only remaining at the table in the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), but also using that seat to play a stronger leadership role in advancing global health security. Conversely, walking away would have negative impacts on Americans and create space for competitors and adversaries that seek harm to our interests. And it would mean working to build the world’s strongest bioeconomy, safeguarding emerging biotechnologies against deliberate and accidental misuse, and building capacity to detect and respond to disease threats around the world.
Finally, to achieve these goals, the incoming administration must adopt and invest in the work of the National Security Council’s Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense and the White House Office on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. These non-partisan experts have spent years building a national and global firefighting team to enhance American readiness for biological threats. This team should be empowered and expanded, not shuttered.
It’s highly likely the incoming administration will have to deal with a major health emergency very early in its tenure. In 2025, we will learn whether the new administration will pick up where it left off or whether it can turn the page on past pandemic performance and prevent future biological catastrophes.
–Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron is a professor of the practice and senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
Reimagining the Future of Talent: A multi-generational dialogue at Spelman College
ATLANTA, Sept. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- In partnership with Spelman College, Tapestry Networks brought together corporate leaders, faculty, and students for a knowledge exchange on Reimagining the Future of Talent. Held on Spelman's Atlanta campus during National HBCU Week, the dialogue focused on how companies are adapting their talent strategies to shifts in workforce demographics, changing expectations from younger workers, and seismic developments in technology. Corporate executives and board members joined from over 40 organizations, including Accenture, AIG, Boston Scientific, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cigna, The Coca-Cola Company, Google, Novartis, Salesforce, Warner Brothers, Kohl's, Honeywell, Celsius, LHH, Arthur M Blank Family Foundation, and Assemble.fyi. Leading academic administrators, faculty, and students engaged in the conversation, coming from Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgetown University, and Brown University.
