President Obama told a group of international military leaders Tuesday that the world “is not doing enough” to fight the Ebola epidemic.
“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,” Obama said. “There are a number of countries that have capacity that have not yet stepped up.”
{mosads}Obama made the comments at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington while addressing representatives from 21 nations that are participating in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“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,” Obama said.
The president’s comments were only the latest example of the administration admonishing the global community to step up its response to the epidemic, which has left nearly 4,500 people dead in West Africa.
On Monday, Obama appealed to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and French President Francois Hollande to put pressure other international players to step up their involvement. And over the weekend, National Security Adviser Susan Rice told NBC News that other countries “haven’t done enough” to battle the outbreak.
“We are pushing very hard for everybody to do more,” Rice said. “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.”
The president also offered his “thoughts and prayers” to a Dallas-area nurse who contracted Ebola after treating a Liberian man who was able to travel to the U.S. while infected with the virus. Obama reiterated that the administration was surging resources to Texas to determine “what exactly has happened that ended up infecting the nurse there.”
“We are going to make sure that all the lessons learned from Dallas are then applied to hospitals and health centers around the country,” Obama said.