During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, the CDC signed a bilateral agreement with the government of Liberia to share information, but the CDC subsequently refused to give the data it gathered to the US Department of Defense, arguing that its agreement with Liberia prohibited the CDC from sharing the information with “third parties.” This was “unconscionable,” one former senior US government official involved in the Ebola response said to me. “They wouldn’t even share it across agencies of the U.S. government,” he said. The US military was already on the ground in Liberia, as part of
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