Ebola vs. COVID-19: public health lessons from Liberia

There is a plethora of literature, addressing public health policies regarding COVID-19. The following paragraphs are excerpted from an article by Anfaara et al. published in Social Science and Medicine, January 2025

"Like elsewhere in the world, care work is gendered, with women bearing the brunt of caregiving during disease outbreaks or health emergencies. However, in Liberia, we argue that the inadequacies of the health system and past political administrations further exacerbated the care burden on women. While this aligns with our theoretical framework, it is noteworthy that despite both governments (Sirleaf and Weah) representing the elite ruling class in Liberia, our participants seem to credit one administration for being more responsive to disease containment. For instance, our participants perceived the Sirleaf administration's willingness to include grassroots organisations and other major stakeholders in Ebola management as a collective effort and a critical reason for the success of Ebola containment. This is probably because, during the initial crisis stage of Ebola, the Sirleaf administration created the National and County-level Ebola task force to brainstorm and initiate strategies to mitigate the spread of Ebola before the arrival of international support. Women's groups, in particular, were invited to be part of the national Ebola response, and there was regular Ebola messaging and communications from the government during this period; as well, on multiple occasions, Sirleaf called for an "all-hands-on-deck" approach to Ebola containment (WHO, 2015; BBC, 2014). Study participants observed that similar strategies were not fully implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Certainly, the Weah administration implemented some of the post-Ebola disease management strategies to contain COVID-19. These included early surveillance, implementing a state of emergency, and restricting local and international travel (Babalola et al., 2022). Yet, participants perceived the administration's approach to COVID-19 management as unitary due to its exclusion of grassroots community-based groups in its response strategies and the government's promotion of alternative COVID-19 remedies. It is possible that the Weah's administration promotion of an alternative solution to COVID-19 containment (see News Public Trust, 2020) may have undermined vaccine uptake and reinforced conspiracy theories about the disease. This experience is not unique to Liberia; in fact, many studies have shown that leadership by positive examples reinforce scientifically proven disease management strategies while negative examples erode trust (Kutor et al., 2022; Nyenswah et al., 2016)."