Everything is proceeding according to plan
Short version: political correctness. Longer version:
By early June of last year, the Ebola epidemic centered on Guinea was the deadliest ever recorded. Foreign workers were being evacuated. Top disease-fighters warned that the virus could soon spread across West Africa.
But the World Health Organization resisted sounding the alarm until August, partly for political reasons, despite the fact that senior staff in Africa proposed doing so in June, The Associated Press has found. The two-month delay, some argue, may have cost lives. More than 10,000 are believed to have been killed by the virus since WHO first announced the outbreak a year ago.
WHO has acknowledged acting too slowly to control the Ebola epidemic. In its defense, the agency says the virus’s spread was unprecedented and blames several factors, including lack of resources and intelligence from the field. Internal documents obtained by AP, however, show WHO’s top leaders were informed of how dire the situation was. But they held off on declaring an emergency in part because it could have angered the countries involved, interfered with their mining interests or restricted the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in October.
Can’t let a little thing like a deadly, practically incurable, horribly painful disease interfere with the hajj, now can we? Far better to risk thousans of lives than offend Muslim “sensibilities.”
When will the West finally rise up and say to these people: enough!
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