A man who cheated death from Ebola has told this newsroom that the global health establishment is still too slow, too underfunded and too cold to stop the next outbreak. He spoke exclusively as a UK research hub takes the lead on experimental treatments against the virus that killed 11,000 in West Africa.
The survivor, who asked to be identified only as Samuel, spent three weeks in a treatment centre in Sierra Leone in 2014. He watched nurses die around him. He saw children taken away in plastic sheets. He knows what works, he says. And it is not bureaucracy.
“Speed is everything,” Samuel told me from his home in Freetown. “The money has to be there before the first case. And I don’t mean committees. I mean cash on the ground, PPE in the warehouse, trained staff with their bags packed.” He paused. “And compassion. Don’t treat us like numbers. We are people dying alone in a room.”
His testimony comes as the UK’s Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford announces a major clinical trial network for filoviruses, including Ebola and Marburg. The hub, backed by £8 million of taxpayer funds, aims to slash the time it takes to test new drugs from years to weeks. Sources confirm the project will use mobile labs and digital data capture to run trials in the middle of outbreaks.
Dr Helen Carter, the institute’s director, said the goal is “never again to see a death toll like 2014”. But Samuel scoffs at the promise. “I heard that in 2015. I heard it in 2018. The suits come, they take photos, they leave. The next outbreak will come. And we will be caught unprepared again because the money is always too slow.”
Documents obtained by this newsroom show that the World Health Organization’s emergency fund remains chronically undercapitalised. A leaked internal memo from March 2023 estimates that the WHO has only enough cash to respond to three small outbreaks at once. For a major epidemic, the shortfall is in the hundreds of millions.
The UK hub will focus on three drugs: remdesivir, a monoclonal antibody cocktail, and a new antiviral called obeldesivir. The trials are designed to be adaptive, meaning failing treatments are dropped early and promising ones accelerated. But the real bottleneck, according to frontline staff, is not science. It is logistics and trust.
“In 2014, we had to pay salaries for burial teams in cash because banks were closed,” said a former MSF coordinator who worked in Kenema. “We were running out of body bags. The world didn’t care until people in suits started catching it.” He was referring to the handful of Western aid workers who were evacuated to Europe and given experimental drugs while locals died without treatment.
Samuel remembers that bitterness. He is grateful to be alive. But survivor’s guilt has turned into something harder: a demand for accountability. “The vaccine was developed in months because it was for white people,” he said. “Then they tested it on us. That is the speed I am talking about. When it matters to them, they find the money. When it matters to us, they hold meetings.”
The UK hub insists its model is different. Trials will be open to all affected populations from day one. Data will be shared in real time with African regulators. But the proof will be in the next outbreak. And it is coming. Scientists say climate change and deforestation are pushing more animal viruses into human populations. The only question is when.
I asked Samuel what he would say to the researchers in Oxford. He was quiet for a moment. “Tell them to come to the village. Sit with the community. Listen. The cure is not just in a syringe. It is in the way you look at us. If you come with arrogance, you will fail. If you come with humility and money in your hand, we will work with you. But do not take years. We do not have years.”
He is right. The clock is ticking. And the suits are still talking.
