Yes, when the world’s leading nations get criticized by the head of the World Bank for blowing their response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa (now a pandemic coming soon to a hospital near you), you know the pooch was truly screwed.
The president of the World Bank, Jim Kim, admitted on Wednesday that the international community had “failed miserably” in its response to the Ebola virus that has killed more than 3,800 people in west Africa and warned that the crisis now affecting Spain and the US was going to get much worse.
Amid signs yesterday that western governments were being forced to take the risks of a global pandemic more seriously, Kim said he wanted them to back a new $20bn (£12bn) global health fund that would be able to react instantly to emergencies.
“It’s late. It’s really late,” he said in an interview with the Guardian before the annual meeting of the Washington-based organisation this weekend.
“We should have done so many things. Healthcare systems should have been built. There should have been monitoring when the first cases were reported. There should have been an organised response.”
And a lot of that screw-up can be tied directly to the result of budget cuts and reduced funding for the World Health Organization, which fumbled its response early on, according to the scientist who first identified the Ebola virus:
Why did WHO react so late?
On the one hand, it was because their African regional office isn’t staffed with the most capable people but with political appointees. And the headquarters in Geneva suffered large budget cuts that had been agreed to by member states. The department for haemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies were hit hard.
Guess who are the biggest funders of WHO? The US Government and the Bill Gates Foundation, <a href="more than our own government! But what the hell, it’s all water over the dam now.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda, but as we all know, if our governments in the developed world gave a damn about saving people’s lives in less developed nations as much as we care about bombing the Middle East into rubble … Meanwhile, back in the US of A, guess how worried our government is about our health care system’s’ readiness to respond to potential ebola victims after Texas led the way in how not to recognize you may have a dangerously ill man in your Emergency Room. This worried:
Public hospitals in New York City are so concerned about Ebola, they’ve secretly been sending actors with mock symptoms into emergency rooms to test how well the triage staffs identify and isolate possible cases.
Hey, it’s not like Ebola suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Our leaders have known of this crisis since March, and certainly they knew it was out of control by July, when Doctors Without Borders went public with their concerns that the pandemic was already beyond our ability to contain it. But our governments just diddled around with more pressing matters, as did our media.
So, instead of containing the Ebola outbreak we allowed it, through our inaction, to spread and spread and spread until, now we give a damn because it’s HERE! In ‘Murica! Well, I doubt the Ebola virus will make serious inroads in the US, but we lost the chance to stop it in its tracks months ago when we still had time to act.
Now, it will continue for many more months if not years, threatening the stability of West and Central Africa, and causing more deaths, not just from the virus itself, but from many consequences of that failure to act in a timely manner.
A Liberian minister has warned the country may slip back to civil war along with neighbouring Sierra Leone if the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa is allowed to continue to spread.
Lewis Brown, Liberia’s information minister, said on Monday the lack of urgency in the international response risked allowing a breakdown of societies in the region, where the outbreak had already claimed almost 3,000 lives.
We are lucky Ebola is not a highly contagious virus, like influenza, because if it was we would be in deep doo-doo with millions of dead people all across the globe. In short we are woefully unprepared for future pandemics. Just reading this audit by the Inspector General of Homland Security regarding our preparedness for a major pandemic made me ill.
A smaller, underfunded, less effective federal government will be the death of us. Two guesses on the party that wants to cut funding for ‘wasteful public health programs’ to the bone.
But funding defense boondoggles and massive NSA surveillance on American citizens? No problem.
Maybe someone should tell them viral pandemics have in the past, and are likely to in the future, kill more Americans than any likely terrorist attacks. Hell, the flu kills more people each year than all the terrorist attacks we have sustained since 9/11 put together, and we have a well organized vaccination program in place for that viral disease.
Not that our Republican ‘friends’ would ever listen. They would rather blame Obama and Democrats for their own policy decisions.
(CNN) — If our children’s children should die from Ebola here in the United States, President Obama would be to blame. […]
[However, when] you look at the timeline [of the Ebola outbreak], it would appear the Obama administration has been leading the fight against the spread of the disease since last winter. [..]
With Democrats in the Senate against the ropes, giddy Republicans hoping for a red November cannot be bothered with facts no matter how egregious their rhetoric to the contrary may be. So, GOP party leaders and promoters go out and proclaim President Obama, the man whose signature piece of legislation is designed to provide preventive care, is doing little to prevent the spread of a deadly disease, and hope voters buy it.
I guess when you have people hating President Obama they’ll believe just about anything bad said about him, even if it’s ridiculous.
The Big Lie technique has worked for them in the past, so I guess it will work for them in the future. I just hope that when the GOP takes back the Senate, and possibly the Presidency in 2016, and the ACA is gutted, that no major viral pandemic or other public health crisis, for which we are sorely unprepared, hits. Because lots of us would die. Of course, they would still blame Obama. It’s in their racist DNA.
