President Obama took to a Joint Base Andrews podium outside Washington and told an audience that included representatives from 21 different nations: The world isn’t stepping up to the plate to fight Ebola.
His exact words, The Hill reported: “As I’ve said before, and I’m going to keep on repeating until we start seeing more progress, the world as a whole is not doing enough. There are a number of countries that have capacity that have not yet stepped up.”
Mr. Obama then called for immediate global action — else face the dire consequences.
“All of us are going to have to do more because unless we contain this at the source, this is going to continue to pose a threat to individual countries at a time when there is no place that’s more than a couple of air flights away, and the transmission of this disease obviously directly threatens all our populations,” Mr. Obama said, The Hill reported.
This isn’t the first time he’s publicly chastised the world for failing to treat Ebola with due concern and response.
He spoke to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and France’s president, Francois Hollande, on Monday and told them to press for other nations to step up their involvement, The Hill reported.
Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said in an NBC News interview over the weekend that other countries “haven’t done enough,” The Hill said.
Her full statement: “We are pushing very hard for everybody to do more. This is going to take all hands on deck because the goal has to be to contain this epidemic in the three countries that we’ve seen in West Africa to try to prevent its spread and to provide the appropriate care to those that need it.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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