his transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
From \u201cThe New York Times,\u201d I\u2019m Natalie Kitroeff. This is \u201cThe Daily.\u201d<\/p>\n
[THEME MUSIC]<\/p>\n
At the front lines of the Ebola crisis in Central Africa, badly equipped health workers with little outside support are losing the fight against one of the worst outbreaks in history. Today my colleague Declan Walsh takes us to the epicenter of the virus to understand why, so far, its spread has been nearly impossible to stop.<\/p>\n
[THEME MUSIC]<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Wednesday, June 3.<\/p>\n
Declan, thank you so much for doing this. Where are you right now?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
I\u2019m in Bunia, a city in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
So you\u2019ve been in the DRC for about a week and a half, covering this horrific Ebola outbreak. So just tell us what you\u2019re seeing, what it\u2019s been like on the ground.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a really dire situation here right now. This outbreak was only detected just over two weeks ago, but the virus was probably spreading for two, some groups are saying even three, months before it was detected. And so we just don\u2019t how deep, how wide it has gotten into the population in these areas. And that\u2019s really hampered efforts not just to treat the people affected by the disease, but to contain its spread.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And in terms of numbers, cases, deaths, where do things stand?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
So far, about 250 people are confirmed to have died. There are about another 1,100 suspected cases, but the true spread and extent of this virus is thought to be much, much wider than that. And I don\u2019t think it\u2019s an exaggeration to say that the virus is way ahead of the response at this point.<\/p>\n
Already, this is the third largest Ebola outbreak on record, and there are groups saying that it has the potential to become the largest ever. Now, that\u2019s a very high bar. The largest Ebola outbreak was between 2014 and 2016 in West Africa, that killed 11,000 people. We\u2019re far off those numbers. But the fact that the response is so far behind the curve makes it obviously much, much harder to start to push it back.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
So what do we about how this started and how it went undetected for so long?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Because of that huge delay, there\u2019s so much we still don\u2019t. But one thing that seems to be almost certain is that this outbreak started in this gold mining town called Mongbwalu. That\u2019s about 50 miles north of Bunia, of the regional capital. And so a couple of days after I got here with our photographer Arlette Bashizi, we got in a car, and we drove to Mongbwalu to find not just the town where it started, but also what the response looked like in this place where, as far as we had heard, there was the greatest number of infections.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And what did you find?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Well, first the road to get there was quite difficult. It was really a road just in name. It was made of mud. It was extremely rough and bumpy. But all along that road, we passed these Congolese military checkpoints. And that was because we were passing through territory where at least three or four different militias were known to operate. So that was complicating the response and also preventing aid workers from getting to this town.<\/p>\n
And when we got to Mongbwalu itself, we went straight to the public hospital, which we knew was the center of treatment efforts. We were expecting, really, to see the architecture of an Ebola response that you classically think of. For some of us, it\u2019s maybe a Hollywood reference, movies like \u201cOutbreak\u201d and so on, these large white tents, lots of people walking around in sealed suits. But there was almost nothing.<\/p>\n
speaker 1<\/p>\n
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And we went into the actual Ebola wards themselves. We put on the full protective equipment. We spoke to the staff. We found a doctor who wanted to take us inside. And there, honestly, it was pretty shocking.<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
speaker 3<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
speaker 4<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Apart from the doctor who brought me in, the ward was just full of people who had come to help the Ebola patients.<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
He has three sisters.<\/p>\n
speaker 4<\/p>\n
These ones, these two.<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
These two and this lady over here.<\/p>\n
speaker 4<\/p>\n
Aunty.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Usually, relatives who had come to bring food or water, because those things aren\u2019t provided by the hospital, but they were wearing almost no protective equipment.<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
speaker 3<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And at the end of the room in the corner, we found this young boy, five-year-old boy called Emmanuel, who was lying on this bare mattress on his own, hooked up to a very simple drip.<\/p>\n
speaker 2<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
speaker 5<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And his dad was standing over him, looking so concerned. And we got speaking in French.<\/p>\n
speaker 5<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
He told me that his son had been going to school just a few days earlier, when the teacher sent him home. Apparently, he had a headache and a fever. The family tried to look after him for the first few days, but he got worse.<\/p>\n
speaker 5<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And then he said that the night before, Emmanuel started to bleed uncontrollably out of his nose. And so they rushed him to this hospital. And when he was lying there, he had this tissue stuffed up his nose to try and staunch that bleeding.<\/p>\n
speaker 5<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And what was even more striking was that just a couple of yards away, two beds down, there was lying the body of a 21-year-old woman called Christiane Bahati, who had died just hours earlier. The doctor said that she had been doing fine in the evening. And then suddenly, at about two o\u2019clock in the morning, she fell into a coma.<\/p>\n
speaker 6<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And died very quickly. He said they were unable to revive her. Her shoes were still under the bed, where she had left them. Her belongings were in a bag. But what was so disturbing about that is that the body of a person who has just died of Ebola is extremely contagious, and yet the remains of this poor woman were just covered by this thin sheet. And people were walking in and out of this ward with very little protection, including, it has to be said, the dad of this boy. This just seemed to go against every precaution that you could take against Ebola.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And did you get a sense of why this was happening? Did you talk to the doctors? What was going on? I\u2019m sure they didn\u2019t want that to be happening either.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
No, the doctors were very well aware of the risks.<\/p>\n
speaker 7<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
But they said, look, what can we do? This is the space we\u2019ve got available to us. These are the resources that we have. We only have a certain amount of protective equipment. We can\u2019t give it to all of our staff, because simply we don\u2019t have it.<\/p>\n
And frankly, they also said, we\u2019re not really trained for this. We didn\u2019t receive any special training for this. We were suddenly hit with this declaration of an outbreak. And we are making do as best as we can. But this young doctor who was bringing me around \u2014<\/p>\n
speaker 7<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
He was angry at his own government because it took the authorities so long to discover this outbreak, two, possibly three, months after it started.<\/p>\n
speaker 7<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And he was also angry more broadly at the international system of Ebola response, that architecture of experts and aid groups and so on, because so few of them had reached this town where it started and where the greatest number of cases were.<\/p>\n
speaker 7<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Even though he was wearing the protective gear, I could see in his eyes and hear in his voice his intense frustration. And as we were looking at this scene, at one point, he turned around to me, and he said, we are 12 days into this outbreak. Is this the best we can do?<\/p>\n
speaker 7<\/p>\n
[SPEAKING FRENCH]<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Well, OK. To this doctor\u2019s question, Declan, why has the response been so slow? What have you come to understand about that?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Part of the reason is to do with the virus itself, or rather, with this strain of the virus. Ebola is this highly contagious hemorrhagic disease, which is spread not like COVID-19, through respiratory means, but it\u2019s spread through touch, usually by touching bodily fluids of a person who is infected. Now, this particular strain of the disease is called Bundibugyo. It\u2019s named after, in fact, a town in Western Uganda, about 60 miles from here, across the border, where it first occurred in 2007.<\/p>\n
And like all the viruses that cause Ebola, it\u2019s thought to reside in the fruit bat population. And it just happens that there is a large fruit bat population that roosts in the trees in this region. But it is an incredibly rare strain of the virus. This is only the third Bundibugyo outbreak ever. What that means is that as yet, there is not a vaccine or a cure for this disease.<\/p>\n
On top of that, when Ebola spreads into a population, it often presents in people initially with symptoms that are very similar to malaria or typhoid. Now, they happen to be extremely common diseases in this area. And in a town like Mongbwalu, people are very used to getting these diseases. And when they do, they typically don\u2019t go to the hospital. In fact, sometimes they don\u2019t even go and see a doctor. Many poor people, they tend to go to traditional healers, or they\u2019ll go to some local small clinic. All of that combined means that people in Mongbwalu were really only going to the hospital for medical help when they were approaching the last stages in the disease.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
So people are delaying treatment basically because it seems like they may think that they have one of these more common illnesses. They just don\u2019t how serious it actually is.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right. And then the other issue the doctors brought up was with testing. Because it\u2019s this very rare strain, initially, there wasn\u2019t even a test in this entire region for Bundibugyo. When they first detected what they saw as this mysterious wave of deaths in this town that happened all through the month of April and then into early May, they send samples off to the regional lab to get it tested, and it came back negative for Ebola, because they were testing for an entirely different strain, the much more common strain, which is called Zaire. And that it was only eventually when health officials sent a sample to the capital, Kinshasa, that they tested it for this rare Bundibugyo strain. And then that came back positive, and they identified the disease.<\/p>\n
So since the outbreak has started, there\u2019s been this chronic shortage of testing kits to identify who\u2019s got Bundibugyo. And that just makes treatment at the hospital really hard, because the doctors told us that they would send off a test and not get a result for four or five, six days. Oftentimes, they said, by the time the test result came back, the patient was already dead.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
So all the elements are in place for this disease to fester in this place that, as you said, is very remote, far from a major city, difficult to get to.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Yes. And you\u2019d think that that isolation would prevent the spread of the disease. But in fact, there are several factors that in some respects made this town an ideal place, not just for the disease to take off, but also to spread across the region. So it\u2019s this gold mining town that has a huge population of migrant laborers. And because mining has money, it brings traders. It brings gold smugglers. It brings sex workers. And these are all people who move in and out of the town as well. That also, incidentally, has possibly been a factor that provided vectors for the disease to spread elsewhere.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
I want to ask. We\u2019ve been hearing a lot about the Trump administration pulling back on foreign aid. How much of an impact did that have in the spread of Ebola in this case?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Well, if you speak to people in the aid community, for them, there is no doubt that if USAID and American aid more generally were still in place, that this virus would have been detected sooner than it was. The other point that aid workers brought up is that the US was providing a lot of funding for general humanitarian aid in the Congo, and some of that money went to funding small Congolese groups.<\/p>\n
And they weren\u2019t all necessarily working in health. They might have been just community organizations. But the fact of their existence provided a network that could be activated at short notice in response to a crisis. And now that network really just wasn\u2019t available when it was needed this time.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And did things change once this was declared an outbreak, once it became clear just how fast Ebola was spreading? Did the US or other international aid groups step up?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Yes, I mean, the aid machine has started up, and the experts are coming into this area. Aid is starting to arrive. But then it turns out that there is another obstacle to pushing back this outbreak. And that\u2019s the fact that many of the people in some of the worst affected communities have a deep mistrust for the people who are trying to save them.<\/p>\n
[MUSIC PLAYING]<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll be right back.<\/p>\n
Explain what you just said, that people have this distrust of aid groups, of the people trying to contain this virus. What\u2019s going on there?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Look, a huge obstacle to fighting this outbreak has been the fact that a lot of people in these communities are still in denial about the virus, either they don\u2019t accept that it exists at all, or they see it as somehow a curse, or they see it as a conspiracy theory. When we were there, we heard so many stories about how people saw this disease as some sort of conspiracy between doctors and the local hospital and these foreign aid groups who they thought were bringing this disease to the community. In fact, there was a story that we heard that Doctors Without Borders, which had Jeeps that have extremely high antennas sticking out of the roof, that Doctors Without Borders were using those antennas to somehow spread the disease among the community.<\/p>\n
Now, there is, strangely enough, I think, a sort of logical explanation for this. And that goes like this. This community had been grappling with this wave of mysterious deaths until this outbreak was finally detected and declared. And so by the time we had an explanation for it, which was Ebola, there were already hundreds of cases.<\/p>\n
So this community is faced with this tidal wave of infections and deaths, and people are searching for an explanation. They\u2019re going to the hospital too late to get treatment. By the time they get there, many of them are dying. And so people, in a certain way, logically, are starting to associate the hospital as a place where people go not to have their lives saved, but to die.<\/p>\n
And so I think that really is partly at the root of some of these wild conspiracy theories that were going around. But what that meant in practice for the medical staff at the hospital is that they not only were grappling with this incredibly dangerous disease and chronically under-equipped to fight it, but they were also dealing with this intense hostility from the community.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And what did that hostility actually look like? How did it play out? How did you see it?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
So when we got to Mongbwalu, the huge issue was how to deal with the body of this popular pastor who had just died the night before. His name was Sylvestre Atama. He was this charismatic Catholic preacher in the town who had a pretty big following. And when we arrived at the hospital, the director told us that his followers had gathered at the gate of the hospital, and they were demanding to get his body so that they could bury it in the traditional Congolese fashion. Now, the hospital director refused, because he said, that would have been a disaster for the spread of the disease in the town.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Because traditional burial practices in the Congo involve large numbers of mourners touching the body of a deceased person.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Oh, no.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And so a funeral can become a super spreader event. And that, in fact, has been a problem in previous outbreaks.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
OK, makes sense.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
But the refusal to give up this body by the director enraged his supporters, who didn\u2019t believe his explanations about why this was an incredibly unsafe thing to do. And so the day before, they had stormed into the hospital compound, and the director told me he had been chased through the compound, with people throwing rocks at him. And in fact, parked outside his office. I could see his vehicle, which had a hole in one of the windows, where he said people threw rocks that didn\u2019t hit him, but they hit his car.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
They\u2019re literally attacking the hospital director.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
They are literally attacking him in order to get this body. They refused. And then he said that the security forces were called to try and bring peace. Then we turn up the next day. Then that evening, we went back to our hotel in the town, and just as we were settling in after dark, we hear these gunshots going off. And it turns out that a crowd of over 100 young men, again, supporters of this cleric, had converged on the hospital yet again in an effort to spring out this body.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
My god.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
The police and the soldiers were firing their weapons in the air to try and disperse them. Then this crowd of people went around the back of the hospital, tried to attack it from another side. And this running battle went on for five hours, all through the evening.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Five hours?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Until 11 o\u2019clock at night, when the police finally got the situation under control.<\/p>\n
And then the next morning, after careful negotiation with the church authorities, the body was escorted by a line of soldiers from the hospital down to the local cemetery, where it was safely buried.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
OK, so this sounds like a particularly extreme incident. How common is this reaction to the hospital workers, to the aid workers, to the people who are directly working on the front lines of the virus?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Well, I would say this incident was exceptional because it involved this very prominent local figure who had a huge following. But the dynamic, unfortunately, is very common, because across the city, Red Cross workers who were trying to carry out these what they call safe burials of these bodies \u2014 in other words, instead of allowing a lot of people to come and touch the body, the body will typically be disinfected. It will be placed in a sealed bag, and these workers will ensure that while there is a dignified burial, it\u2019s not going to turn into an event where many other people will become infected.<\/p>\n
So the teams of Red Cross workers trying to carry out these burials often run into the same kind of resistance. They\u2019ve been threatened. They\u2019ve been attacked. Because people effectively don\u2019t believe the virus exists, or else they don\u2019t believe that it poses a threat to them. Or frankly, I think they just feel overwhelmed by the scale of the calamity that has befallen their community. And so they take it out, again, on the people who are trying to ensure that this disease doesn\u2019t spread even further.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And do you have an understanding from your conversations with health officials of just how big of an obstacle this is in the effort to get the outbreak under control? How much is it actually stymieing the response, do you think?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
It\u2019s huge. When you talk to health officials or aid workers and say, what do you need to push this back? The first thing, of course, they say is we need equipment. We need protective equipment. We need medicine. We need funds. The second thing they say is we need education. We need an immediate, urgent effort to communicate to people about the nature of the danger that they face.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
We have some experience with this kind of thing from COVID. Even in the United States, there were a lot of conspiracy theories. There was a lot of mistrust, of the medical establishment, of hospitals. It strikes me that this is a harder thing to solve than even perhaps getting the resources to where they need to be. I mean, building trust is not an easy or a quick thing.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very challenging. But there is precedent. I mean, in previous outbreaks in West Africa in 2014, 2015, in the second largest outbreak, which was also in Congo, health workers ran into similar problems. And so there are tools, there are techniques, there are ideas for combating this problem, but it really does take a concerted, intensive effort.<\/p>\n
While we were in Mongbwalu, I went to see the local parish priest, the Catholic priest, because this preacher who had just died was a Catholic. And I said, what are you doing to try and address this problem? And he said, at mass last Sunday, in my sermon, I appealed to people to carry out safe burials to adhere to the correct practices. But he said, until now, people are not listening. He said it\u2019s going to take a much bigger and more intensive effort to try and convince these communities about what they need to change in their own lives in order to keep themselves safe.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Declan, what do we know about how far it\u2019s spread outside of the DRC at this point?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
There has been one death in neighboring Uganda, and I believe about eight or nine suspected cases at the moment. There are great fears that it is also spreading into South Sudan. But for now, this virus has, for the large part, remained confined in Ituri province. And there have been some cases in two other Congolese provinces as well. But again, I got to stress that we just don\u2019t know enough about the extent of this virus just yet. And that brings us to another key part of the effort to fight the virus that they haven\u2019t, frankly, even started on in earnest yet, which is called contact tracing.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Contact tracing, meaning trying to understand where everybody who is infected has been, who they may have seen, touched, been in contact with.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right. The problem is that because this is such a rare strain and because there are such limited testing facilities, they\u2019ve barely started the work of tracing those contacts yet, and all the experts in this field say that until you trace the contacts, you cannot cut the chain of transmission, and you can\u2019t really expect to contain the spread of the disease.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
OK, obviously, there is a lot of uncertainty here. There are a lot of unpredictable factors at play. But from your reporting, Declan, what is your understanding of the best case and the worst case scenario for containing the spread right now?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Well, the worst case scenario is that this outbreak goes on for several years and that the numbers soar, not just the numbers of people affected, but that the death toll rises, possibly to the level that we saw back in West Africa in 2014, 2015. But it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. There is an outcome here where the scale of international assistance rises to meet the challenge of this outbreak.<\/p>\n
So I think it\u2019s still an open question about which way we\u2019re going to go, because don\u2019t forget, we are very early into this outbreak. That\u2019s kind of in a way what\u2019s so worrisome about it. It\u2019s only been two weeks since it was officially declared, and I\u2019ve been speaking to people on the ground here, and they say it already feels like they\u2019ve been at this for months, because it\u2019s been such an intense start.<\/p>\n
Most Ebola outbreaks start with a handful of cases, and then it spreads. The challenge with this one is that from day one, there were hundreds of suspected cases and many deaths, and those numbers are just going up and up at the moment.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Declan, I can\u2019t stop thinking about Emmanuel, the five-year-old boy who you met in the clinic with his dad. Do you know how he\u2019s doing?<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
I do, I\u2019ve been in touch with his dad. He\u2019s been sending me messages every day. And a couple of days ago, he sent me a message, and he said that his son had been sitting up, had been drawing numbers, because he\u2019d just been learning to count, and that he was asking for his toys.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Amazing.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
And then today, he said that Emmanuel\u2019s been discharged, and he\u2019s gone home.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
Wow. So one moment of hope, at least, in all this. Declan, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time.<\/p>\n
declan walsh<\/p>\n
Thank you, Natalie.<\/p>\n
[PENSIVE MUSIC]<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll be right back.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what else you need to know today.<\/p>\n
archived recording (todd blanche)<\/p>\n
Look, we\u2019re not moving forward with the fund, period.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
The Trump administration is abandoning plans to create a $1.8 billion fund for people who said they were victims of unfair government prosecution, including January 6 rioters. The fund had drawn fierce opposition from the courts and Congress, including congressional Republicans. During testimony before a House committee on Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who, just days ago, advocated for the fund, told lawmakers that it was now dead.<\/p>\n
archived recording 1<\/p>\n
Not moving forward ever?<\/p>\n
archived recording (todd blanche)<\/p>\n
Correct.<\/p>\n
archived recording 1<\/p>\n
Oh, there\u2019s no more fund then.<\/p>\n
archived recording (todd blanche)<\/p>\n
Well, to the extent there was a fund, remember, the fund wasn\u2019t set up yet.<\/p>\n
natalie kitroeff<\/p>\n
And President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, asking tech companies to give the government oversight of new AI models before releasing them. Under the order, tech companies would give the government 30 days to review their models before making them available to the public, and the Treasury secretary would study security vulnerabilities discovered by the models. This is the administration\u2019s biggest step toward regulating AI, and it marked a change in approach for Trump, who had previously promoted a hands-off stance toward the technology.<\/p>\n
[THEME MUSIC]<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s episode was produced by Clare Toeniskoetter, Stella Tan, and Chris Benderev with help from Adrienne Hurst. It was edited by Chris Haxel, with help from Marc Georges, and contains music by Leah Shaw Dameron, Rowan Niemisto, Pat McCusker, and Sophia Lanman. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Brad Kimbrough.<\/p>\n
[THEME MUSIC]<\/p>\n
That\u2019s it for \u201cThe Daily,\u201d I\u2019m Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"his transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14163,81401,94314,9,11,10],"class_list":["post-253933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-congo","tag-democratic-republic-of-congo-kinshasa","tag-epidemics","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}