If the last few month of bellicose GOP presidential hopefuls caterwauling about saving Western civilization didn’t finally persuade the establishment that their narrative is no longer operative, the battalion of candidates’ uniform reaction to this week’s announcement of a nuclear agreement with Iran should get the job done. No one could have expected someone like Lindsey “stop them before they kill us all” Graham to be circumspect in his comments. But saying that the agreement was “akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs” was over the top even for him. And Rick “you will live by exactly the standards that the rest of us live by” Perry could have been expected to be opposed. Even still, his statement that the agreement is “one of the most destructive foreign policy decisions in my lifetime” went well beyond even his normal level of belligerence.
Jeb Bush pretty much made a declaration demanding regime change in Iran, which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise considering the family history in the region. Scott Walker, the man who once said that his historic battle with kindergarten teachers in Wisconsin made him the best prepared to face down ISIS, said that the deal “will be remembered as one of America’s worst diplomatic failures” and then said that if he were president he’d sprinkle fairy dust on the world and make it all go away. (Well, to be precise, he said, “in order to ensure the safety of America and our allies, the next president must restore bipartisan and international opposition to Iran’s nuclear program while standing with our allies to roll back Iran’s destructive influence across the Middle East,” which is kind of amusing coming from a guy who calls the president “breathtakingly out of touch with reality.”)
“We have a lot of lessons from Ebola that have been identified. I’m not sure that they’ve actually been learned,” said Ron Waldman, a physician who was in was in the trenches last year leading the Ebola response team for the humanitarian organization, Save the Children.
“The problem is much more complex than a one-to-one relationship between a cause and effect,” Waldman said. “And fixing it so it doesn’t happen again is going to require a very broad range of repair.”
Concerns about recovery and infectious disease preparedness were substantiated by a report released just days before the donor conference, in which the World Health Organization conceded that the Ebola crisis “exposed organizational failings” – and that the WHO still does not have the capacity to fully respond to a future medical emergency.
The new funding for Ebola recovery in West Africa was made at an international donor conference held last week in New York by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Donors including the governments of the United States and European Union and the World Bank vowed their support to strengthen health systems across-the-board as well as to bolster education, infrastructure and economic development.
While this approach to Ebola recovery is a holistic one, those working in other areas of public health warn that the spotlight on Ebola could hamper efforts to address other global challenges.
“The real threat is that Ebola is taking away from other vaccine-preventable diseases,” said Richard Hatzfeld, a spokesman for the Sabin Vaccine Institute, an organization that develops and advocates for vaccines. “When you divert that attention it’s very difficult to get it back.”
Waldman, who traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the height of the 2014 outbreak, saw this first-hand.
“I like to talk about the epidemic of non-Ebola mortality that occurred in the Ebola affected countries during the outbreak,” he said. “There were many more deaths from malaria, many more deaths from pneumonia and diarrhea and non-Ebola causes because of the absolute disruption of the healthcare system.”
Malaria kills over one million people each year, and typically accounts for 40 percent of patients treated in Liberian hospitals and facilities. Last year Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea saw an estimated 11,000 more deaths than average due to malaria, WHO reported in a press briefing last week.
The worst Ebola outbreak in history has resulted in 11,200 deaths in West Africa, and around 30 new infections are still being reported each week.
“Look, we all come from a privileged background, right? So taking this into account, what is our risk analysis? I would say the probability of us getting killed is low. We also know that because we come from connected families, if we are arrested, we would get special treatment, get detained for a short time and then released. So I am looking at the optimistic side of the risk spectrum and saying, look: it’s not that likely that something really terrible is going to happen to us. And even if the demonstrations don’t succeed”—Aly spread his hands wide, to concede this was the most likely probability of all—“we won’t have to regret not doing anything and we can say, At least we tried. Not like our parents, who have done nothing for thirty years and watched Egypt stagnate into this mess.”
At the end of the evening eight of Aly’s friends had agreed to join the protest. Three said maybe. The rest demurred. The nays did not make excuses, they just didn’t think it would amount to anything.
The next day Aly went out onto the street with a hangover. Five of his friends showed up; four yeses had dropped out overnight and one maybe had decided yes after all. They marched with several hundred others, chanting, navigating the police lines, blocking intersections. They managed to get onto Tahrir in the mid-afternoon and arrived amazed to find themselves cheered by the few thousand already gathered there. Aly was standing very close to the police line when the first rocks went over. He described things carefully, weighing remembered moments for accuracy. What had he really seen? Once or twice I interrupted, “Sorry, did you say see or seem?”
The rocks went over in a barrage and the police picked them up and threw them back. There were also gun cracks. Aly began to run back from the front line, thinking that it was stupid to throw rocks at the police because it only provoked them, but he stumbled and looked down and saw his friend Seif collapsed on the ground. Seif was curled up with his arms around his head, rocking himself, covered in blood. Another friend crouched down too. They couldn’t tell what was bleeding—Seif was the doctor among them—everything was very chaotic, some of the kids were running after police vans careening through the crowd. So much blood! They pulled off Seif’s T-shirt and saw dozens of red-ringed black pellet dots on one side of his torso and continuing along the underside of his arm. Bird shot. They wiped away the blood with his T-shirt and could see that the wounds were not deep. After a few moments, Seif sat up. He was all right. People around them said, don’t worry, he’s not critical, it’s better to let him rest a bit, not drag him around trying to find an exit and make him bleed more.