Africa: An Ebola “Fortress Strategy” Will Fail – Lessons from the Past

In late 2014, I watched the Zaire strain of Ebola overwhelm Liberia and Sierra Leone following its emergence from Patient Zero, a two-year-old toddler in Southern Guinea. The international community was frozen in bureaucratic inertia.

I remember a frantic 48 hours spent coordinating emergency lines between Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and U.S. congressional leaders to bypass gridlock in Washington and catalyze White House action—an operational challenge I detailed in the epilogue of…