Late last week, the Associated Press reported of a leaked World Health Organization (WHO) document that described and acknowledged the failures of the response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak.
In response to the AP report the WHO released the following statement:
A WHO internal document recently obtained by some media outlets was the first draft of a small team documenting the chronology of the Ebola outbreak events for future review. This document has not yet been fact-checked or reviewed by WHO staff involved in the initial response to Ebola, and is part of an on-going analysis of our response.
WHO will not do interviews or explain details on this document until it is completed. WHO believes in transparency and accountability and will release this review when it is fact-checked. For now, WHO’s focus is to obtain the resources needed to successfully fight this Ebola outbreak.
A full review and analysis of global responses to this, the largest-ever Ebola outbreak in history, will be completed and made public once the outbreak is under control. We are a public health organization and our focus right now must be to stop this outbreak and save lives. We cannot divert our limited resources from the urgent response to do a detailed analysis of the past response. That review will come, but only after this outbreak is over.
