I find the premise of this article very hard to believe. On one hand I am sure that the researchers shared their results with the responsible agencies at the time. I very much doubt that they would have just written up this article, submitted it to the journal and called it a day. These studies are usually done in direct collaboration with local doctors, and governments, even if they might not have been authors on the paper.
On the other hand the poor state of Liberia's (and the whole region's) health system and the threat of infectious diseases has been a known problem for a long time. I can't imagine that hearing about a small number of cases of people with Ebola antibodies in 1982 would have made any difference to Liberia's policies. They were already doing all they could to improve their health system and Ebola is/was far from the only threat.
You should look into the whole "open access" movement in research. There is a huge, HUGE disparity in access to journals and research between scientists in North America / Europe and developing countries.
Researchers in the US do not cite African journals and likely do not read them; African scientists often cannot afford journals from US universities -- journal access on SAGE or Taylor & Francis can run well over $10K per year.
The premise isn't hard to believe if you've spent any time in research institutions or academies in these countries, and it's extremely unfortunate.
Except that there are initiatives (Research4Life, HINARI, AGORA, etc) to get free access to researchers in the developing world, especially Africa. If you move to "open access," African scientists won't be able to get published.
I have no experience in the health science world, but in IT most scientists say it's only about publishing papers nowadays. Discoveries don't matter, making it useful doesn't matter. Write a paper, get it published, rinse, and repeat.
Health is a much much older area, so I would be pessimistic about finding more fresh and reasonable patterns there. So the article sounds very reasonable to me, but I really, really hope that what you write is true.
On the other hand the poor state of Liberia's (and the whole region's) health system and the threat of infectious diseases has been a known problem for a long time. I can't imagine that hearing about a small number of cases of people with Ebola antibodies in 1982 would have made any difference to Liberia's policies. They were already doing all they could to improve their health system and Ebola is/was far from the only threat.