The White House refrained from allowing an American doctor exposed to the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo to be treated promptly, according to The Washington Post.
The administration’s hesitation to admit the return of Dr. Peter Stafford, 39, to the United States delayed his evacuation for treatment in Germany, the newspaper said, citing five people familiar with the Ebola response.
Timely recognition of the infection and effective isolation are essential to providing care for the disease, which can progress to multi-organ failure in a matter of days, The Post reported.
Stafford began feeling sick on Saturday while he was working as the only surgeon at a hospital in a remote area of Congo, his missionary group’s executive director, Matt Allison, told The Post. The next day, the CDC learned that Stafford had tested positive for the Bundibugyo virus, a strain of Ebola with a 25 to 50 percent fatality rate and no approved vaccine.
Around the same time that Stafford was transported to the Charité Hospital in Berlin, the family of another American physician from Stafford’s missionary group, Patrick LaRochelle, returned to the United States, a CDC official said.
LaRochelle’s wife and children were cleared by CDC medical experts, and a risk assessment determined that they had not been exposed to a high-risk patient with Ebola symptoms, a CDC official said. LaRochelle, 46, is asymptomatic and was transferred to the Buklova Hospital in Prague, according to the missionary group, Serge Global Inc.
Reached for comment about the Washington Post’s report, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told the Daily Beast in a statement: “This is absolutely false and another reason why the Washington Post is no longer worth the paper it’s printed on. The Trump administration’s top and only concern is ensuring the health and safety of American citizens. The Charite Hospital of Germany is internationally recognized as one of the best facilities in the world for the treatment and containment of viral diseases like Ebola, on par with leading facilities here in the United States.”
Desai added that Stafford was “in a very unstable part of the DRC, which as a whole is an unstable country,” and that President Donald Trump “has consistently taken great risks to ensure Americans exposed to deadly and contagious diseases are safely brought back home.”
“The idea that the White House was concerned that bringing a sick American back home to receive the best standard of care would somehow be poor optics is not only false, but nonsensical.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the CDC for comment.
The CDC said in a Sunday release that the agency is “supporting interagency partners who are actively coordinating the safe withdrawal of a small number of Americans who are directly affected by this outbreak.”
The CDC and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response called for Stafford to be evacuated to the U.S., where he could be treated at special facilities with biocontainment units.
One individual told the newspaper that the impasse delayed Stafford’s treatment because “they would not allow him to be transported to the United States.”
The second Trump administration’s response to the situation is much more resistant than the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, which saw the first two American patients evacuated for treatment in Atlanta. Barack Obama was president at the time.
Trump himself was against the decision back then, posting his thoughts about it on social media.
“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” Trump tweeted in August 2014. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”
Individuals with knowledge of the current response told The Post that the optics of bringing an Ebola patient into the country are alarming to the White House.
The CDC official in charge of the agency’s Ebola response, Satish Pillai, told reporters on Tuesday that Stafford is in stable condition, and the risk to the United States is low.
“The key issue here is ensuring the treatment is initiated rapidly and appropriately, and the initial location being Germany given the proximity and the access to the highest levels of care,” Pillai said. “This is what the situation was, and this is how we responded as quickly as we could.”
The Ebola virus is a hemorrhagic fever spread only through direct contact and is often fatal in humans. The outbreak has resulted in 139 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has been linked to nearly 600 suspected cases, The Post reported.
