President Barack Obama has picked a former White House insider rather than a healthcare expert to lead his administration's efforts to stem the Ebola threat in a sudden reversal of its response to the crisis.
Mr Obama has chosen Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to US vice president Al Gore and Joe Biden, as his Ebola “czar” just days after the administration expressed satisfaction with the coordinated approach by various government agencies to contain the spread of the killer virus beyond three cases in Texas.
The Obama administration stepped up its response as efforts to trace a possible chain of infection from the three Ebola cases extended to a cruise ship out at sea and more commercial flights.
Government officials said they were trying to remove, from a Caribbean cruise ship, a Dallas hospital worker who handled an Ebola lab specimen even though she has shown no symptoms of the disease for 19 days. The woman was put in isolation on the ship and is not regarded as a risk to others.
The appointment of Mr Klain, who left the vice president’s office in 2011 and now works for an investment firm, comes after a second nurse was infected with Ebola and travelled on two internal commercial flights after being exposed to the virus while treating a Liberian man. He died of Ebola in Texas on October 8th.
The former White House aide was picked a day after Mr Obama said that he would consider appointing an Ebola chief not because the heads of the various government agencies co-managing the crisis were not doing a good job but because they also had other tasks to manage. Mr Obama has come under political fire from members of Congress over the handling of the Ebola crisis and the transmission of the virus to two nurses who had operated under government healthcare protocols while treating Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan.
Republicans criticised Mr Obama for appointing a former government official rather than an experienced healthcare professional.
Andy Harris, a Republican congressman from Maryland, said in a message posted on Twitter: “Worst Ebola epidemic in world history and Pres Obama puts a government bureaucrat with no healthcare experience in charge. Is he serious?”
The White House said that to coordinate efforts Mr Obama was not looking for “an Ebola expert but an implementation expert”.
“It’s not solely a medical response,” Mr Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest said in defence of his choice. “That’s why somebody with Mr Klain’s credentials – somebody that has both strong management experience inside government but also in the private sector.”
Mr Earnest said that Mr Klain had strong relationships with members of Congress and with staff at the White House given that he had worked at the White House earlier in Mr Obama’s presidency. “All of that means that he is the right person,” he told reporters.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that has managed efforts to contain the disease, said that nurse Amber Vinson, the second healthcare worker to catch the virus, may have had the illness on a flight from Dallas to Cleveland on Friday, October 10th.
She tested positive for Ebola on Tuesday morning, after flying from Cleveland to Dallas the previous night with a low-grade fever, prompting officials to start tracing 132 passengers on that flight.
