Two infectious disease threats are converging on Taiwan's public health radar simultaneously. Hantavirus, a rodent-borne illness that can trigger fatal kidney failure, has logged its first domestic cases since February. Across Africa, Ebola — a hemorrhagic fever that kills roughly half of those it infects — is once again on the move, prompting the World Health Organization in mid-May to declare the outbreak originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, its highest level of alert.
The timing has unsettled public anxiety in Taiwan, an island that endured prolonged COVID-19 border closures before reopening in 2023. And it has given fresh urgency to the advice of José Manuel Barroso, former President of the European Commission, who sat down with Storm Media in Taipei on May 6.
WHO Sounds the Alarm as Ebola Returns to Central Africa
The Ebola resurgence is the most dramatic health story of the first half of 2026 — overshadowed in headlines by U.S. military operations in Venezuela and the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, but arguably more consequential for global public health planning. According to WHO figures, within just five days of the May 15 emergency declaration, the DRC had recorded more than 500 cases and 130 deaths. Uganda, the DRC's eastern neighbor, reported two cases and one fatality.
The scale of the current outbreak has prompted immediate action from Taipei. Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control announced that effective midnight Tuesday, June 2, nationals of the DRC and Uganda — with four defined categories of exceptions — would be barred from entering Taiwan for 90 days.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record ran from December 2013 to March 2016 in West Africa, infecting more than 28,000 people and killing over 11,000 across ten countries, with Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia accounting for 99 percent of fatalities.
Taiwan's COVAX Experience Shapes Its Pandemic Readiness
Barroso, 70, chaired the board of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) from 2021 to 2025 — a tenure that placed him at the center of international COVID-19 vaccine coordination during the pandemic's most chaotic years.
Taiwan's relationship with GAVI dates to September 2020, when the Ministry of Health and Welfare signed an agreement committing to purchase 4.76 million COVID-19 vaccine doses through the COVAX facility. The first delivery — 1.02 million doses of AstraZeneca — arrived in 2021, followed by 2.268 million doses of Novavax in 2022.
COVAX, co-led by GAVI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and the WHO, functioned as a pooled risk mechanism: member economies — 190 in total, including Taiwan — collectively financed early-stage vaccine research and secured advance purchase guarantees, accelerating production timelines and extending equitable access to lower-income nations.
'There Will Almost Certainly Be a Next Time': Barroso's Five Lessons
Barroso came to Taipei at the invitation of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI), where he delivered the keynote at the think tank's annual international forum on "Reshaping the Rules of Global Cooperation." He spoke with Storm Media ahead of the event, drawing on his GAVI years to outline what he sees as the critical lessons for pandemic preparedness.
Prepare in peacetime, because the next pandemic is coming. One of the most sobering things Barroso discovered upon taking the GAVI chairmanship was how thoroughly unprepared most governments were when COVID-19 arrived — including wealthy ones. From a risk management standpoint, he described this as a fundamental failure. "Europe at the time didn't even have enough personal protective equipment — not even the most basic masks," he said. "I hope we are all better prepared next time, because there almost certainly will be a next time."
Build genuine societal resilience. Resilience, as Barroso defines it, is the capacity of individuals and institutions to absorb severe disruption and return to normality. He argued that preparedness cannot be narrowly conceived. It must span public health infrastructure, environmental risk, economic stability, fiscal discipline, social cohesion, and the technological capabilities needed to mount a credible pandemic response.
Treat geopolitical risk as a preparedness accelerant, not a distraction. The current international environment — more polarized, fragmented, and volatile than at any point in recent memory — makes advance preparation and supply-chain diversification more urgent, not less, Barroso contended.
Don't underestimate vaccine diplomacy — or scientists. No single country can contain a pandemic unilaterally; international cooperation is therefore indispensable, and institutions like GAVI become load-bearing. Barroso was candid about the self-interested instincts he witnessed from some governments during COVID-19, focused exclusively on their own populations at the expense of global solidarity. On that measure, he said, scientists consistently outperformed politicians, and multilateral organizations often did more than national governments. "At the worst moments of the pandemic, some of us were working almost around the clock," Barroso recalled. "We saw real commitment and passion from people trying to solve the problem — genuine cooperation, and a capacity to build coalitions across borders."
GAVI itself was founded 25 years ago by the WHO, the World Bank, UNICEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and numerous partner organizations. Its board draws together donor nations, developing countries, pharmaceutical companies, NGOs, and research institutions — a deliberately pluralistic structure.
Choose consensus over votes to prevent internal fracture. Barroso's decade leading the European Commission — reconciling 28 member states, each with distinct languages, political cultures, and policy priorities — gave him an unusually deep appreciation for consensus-building. When he took the GAVI chair in 2021, he was struck to find that, despite the substantial influence of both the United States and China on the board, nearly every major decision was reached by consensus rather than a formal vote.
That approach was deliberate, and deliberate for a reason. "I wanted to avoid the board splitting into two camps or fracturing internally," Barroso explained. The key, he said, was doing the groundwork in committee beforehand and pairing leadership with technical expertise. When agreement seemed out of reach, GAVI's core mandate — saving lives — provided a unifying frame that transcended political differences. "If you focus the discussion on the mission of saving lives, rather than on political differences or ideology, you can often reach a result."
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