Transcript: Dr. Deborah Birx on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," May 24, 2026

Face The Nation Transcripts Transcript: Dr. Deborah Birx on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," May 24, 2026 .chip { background-image: url('/fly/bundles/cbsnewscore/images/chip-bgd/chip-bgd-face-the-nation.jpg'); } May 24, 2026 / 12:19 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google The following is the transcript of the interview with Dr. Deborah Birx that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.NANCY CORDES: We turn now to the escalating Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Joining us to discuss is the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, who also previously helped coordinate the international response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak when she was Global AIDS Coordinator. Dr. Birx, thank you so much for being with us.DR. DEBORAH BIRX: Good to be with you, Nancy.NANCY CORDES : Dr., The White House, the WHO rather, says there are now almost 750 suspected cases in the Congo, around the Congo, and nearly 200 deaths. How does the severity of this situation compare to previous outbreaks?DR. DEBORAH BIRX: Well, the problem with this particular outbreak is there was probably two, three, or four cycles of infection before it was even reported, and so a lot of the numbers you're seeing, and the rapid rise of the numbers, is because it went undetected and underreported for probably three or four weeks. That resulted in a lot of case reporting all at once, and so I can't really tell you what the slope of new cases are, which is really the important thing when you're following an acute infectious disease, but just to make it very clear to your audience, the people we are seeing today that are cases were probably infected two weeks ago. And so I think that's what makes us all concerned, is we're looking at this at this virus and this outbreak with really old data. NANCY CORDES : I want to get to that delay in reporting the outbreak in a moment, but first we saw this week that a plane from Paris to Detroi...