In a remarkable show of chutzpah, President Obama has claimed credit for "stamping out" Ebola.
In his last press conference of 2015 held on Friday, Obama states that his leadership, his diplomacy, and most important his belief in climate change all helped craft the Paris climate agreement, and these same leadership qualities stamped out Ebola.
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"When I went to Copenhagen, I essentially engaged in 24 hours of diplomacy to salvage from a pretty chaotic process," he stated. "This would not have happened without American leadership. And, by the way, the same is true for the Iran nuclear deal. The same is true for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The same is true for stamping out Ebola – something, you guys may recall from last year, which was the potential end of the world. At each juncture, what we've said is, is that American strength and American exceptionalism is not just a matter of us bombing somebody. More often, it's a matter of us convening, setting the agenda, pointing other nations in a direction that's good for everybody and good for U.S. interests, engaging in painstaking diplomacy, leading by example. And sometimes the results don't come overnight, they don't come the following day, but they come. And this year, what you really saw was that steady, persistent leadership on many initiatives that I began when I first came into office."
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Ebola is one of the most terrifying and deadly of the world's diseases. It is a highly infectious virus that can kill up to 90 percent of those contaminated.
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According to Doctors Without Borders, "the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone was declared over on November 7, 2015, but in neighboring Guinea, people are still being infected by the disease, which has claimed more than 11,000 lives in West Africa. Despite the unprecedented scale of the epidemic, there is still much that is unknown about Ebola. … Today, the main risk is the weak monitoring system. There are an estimated 233 people in Guinea who have come into contact with an Ebola patient but who are not being followed."
The president's victory lap may be premature. Researchers have reported the emergence of new health symptoms among survivors, months after being cleared of the virus, among them depression, anxiety and nerve damage that surface after they leave the hospital. The virus is known to remain active in the sperm of men who survive the disease for up to nine months, and a female survivor in Liberia has become infectious again after her immune system was weakened by pregnancy.
The good people of West Africa can rest assured, however, that Obama's leadership skills, diplomacy and belief in climate change will "stamp out" future epidemics.
