Ouch. So the questions is, why did they wait so long?

“The most egregious failure was by WHO in the delay in sounding the alarm,” said Ashish K. Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “People at WHO were aware that there was an Ebola outbreak that was getting out of control by spring…and yet, it took until August to declare a public health emergency. The cost of the delay was enormous,” Jha said.

[…]

The Ebola outbreak created “immense human suffering, fear and chaos, largely unchecked by high-level political leadership or reliable and rapid institutional responses,” the panel said in a poignantly worded report published in the renowned medical journal “The Lancet.”