Obama appoints Ebola czar
LONDON (AP) – US President Barack Obama named a trusted political adviser to take control of America’s frenzied response to the epidemic.
An internal report revealed Friday showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) bungled efforts to halt the spread of Ebola in West Africa.
The stepped-up scrutiny of the international response came as US officials rushed to cut off potential routes of infection from three cases in Texas, reaching a cruise ship in the Caribbean and multiple domestic airline flights.
Obama moved to step up the US response to the disease, naming Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, as the administration’s point man on Ebola.
Klain is a longtime Democratic operative who also served as a top aide to Vice President Al Gore. He does not have any medical or public health expertise. But the White House said he would serve as “Ebola response coordinator,” suggesting his key role will be to synchronize the actions of many government agencies in combating the disease.
“This is much broader than a medical response,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, citing Klain’s experience in the private as well as public sector and his relationships with Congress.
“All of that means he is the right person for the job, and the right person to make sure we are integrating the interagency response to this significant challenge,” he said.
Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration debated the value of restricting travelers from entering the US from countries where the outbreak began, without a resolution.
But with Secretary of State John Kerry renewing pleas for a “collective, global response” to a disease that has already killed more than 4,500 people in Africa, the WHO draft report pointed to serious errors by an agency designated as the international community’s leader in coordinating response to outbreaks of disease.
The document — a timeline of the outbreak — found that WHO, an arm of the United Nations, missed chances to prevent Ebola from spreading soon after it was first diagnosed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea last spring, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information. Its own experts failed to grasp that traditional infectious disease containment methods wouldn’t work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems, the report found.
“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” WHO said in the report, obtained by The Associated Press. “A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force.”
The agency’s own bureaucracy was part of the problem, the report found. It pointed out that the heads of its country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments” made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.