--- title: Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak description: Brice de le Vingne, operations director of MSF, slams the world's "lack of willingness and professionalism" to tackle Ebola. canonical: https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/ author: Per Liljas article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-20T09:49:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:06:38.239Z article:section: Health og:title: Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak og:description: Brice de le Vingne, operations director of MSF, calls the international response to the epidemic "non-existent" og:url: https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt27ac549249045789/6986a028e53aba857c4d4149/ebola-liberia3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2000 og:image:height: 1125 og:image:alt: Liberia Battles Spreading Ebola Epidemic og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak twitter:description: Brice de le Vingne, operations director of MSF, calls the international response to the epidemic "non-existent" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt27ac549249045789/6986a028e53aba857c4d4149/ebola-liberia3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola [Watch (HLS stream): Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8) (2:32)  _Published 2014-08-13. Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola_ by [Per Liljas](https://time.com/author/per-liljas/) ## Per Liljas Aug 20, 2014 9:49 AM UTC  A Liberian burial team wearing protective clothing retrieves the body of a 60-year-old Ebola victim from his home on Aug. 17, 2014 near Monrovia, Liberia. A Liberian burial team wearing protective clothing retrieves the body of a 60-year-old Ebola victim from his home on Aug. 17, 2014 near Monrovia, Liberia. John Moore—Getty Images by [Per Liljas](https://time.com/author/per-liljas/) ## Per Liljas Aug 20, 2014 9:49 AM UTC The main agency fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is [lashing out](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0bb32b28-27bd-11e4-b7a9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3AtY87UyP) at the international response, calling it “non-existent.” “We are completely amazed by the lack of willingness and professionalism and coordination to tackle this epidemic,” Brice de le Vingne, the operations director of Doctors Without Borders, told the _Financial Times_. “We have been screaming for months. Now the situation is even worse – we are today on the verge of seeing an entire country collapsing.” An estimated 2,240 people have been infected with the virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia since it first surfaced in March, and more than half of the afflicted have died. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) [describes](http://www.msf.org.uk/article/ebola-international-response-ebola-epidemic-dangerously-inadequate) the current situation in Liberia as “catastrophic” and continuously deteriorating. The country has closed its borders, declared a state of emergency and on Tuesday it [imposed](http://time.com/3146271/liberia-president-declares-ebola-curfew/) a curfew on the main slum area in the capital of Monrovia, where Ebola panic has lead to public unrest. Fear of infection has compounded the disaster, with workers and patients fleeing Monrovia hospitals in recent days, leading to an almost complete collapse of the health system and causing increased risks for other diseases such as malaria. To be fair, many countries and organizations are sending aid to the affected region. The African Development Bank has [pledged](http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2014-08-20/ebola-crisis-two-austrian-men-given-all-clear-african-development-bank-announces-60-million-to-fight/1358734) $56 million, the United Kingdom has [increased](https://www.gov.uk/government/world-location-news/britain-to-extend-assistance-to-combat-ebola-in-west-africa) its assistance to $8 million, China has [sent](http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/n/2014/0816/c90000-8770457.html) supplies worth $4.9 million, E.U. support [stands](http://allafrica.com/stories/201408130915.html) at $15.8 million, and the U.S. has pledged the same amount of aid as well as [deployed](http://kff.org/global-health-policy/perspective/ebola-in-west-africa-four-questions-for-the-u-s-response-going-forward/?utm%5Fcampaign=KFF:General&utm%5Fcontent=7505975&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fsource=twitter) a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART). According to MSF, however, that’s far from enough. “Leaders in the West are talking about their own safety and doing things like closing airlines – and not helping anyone else,” Brice de la Vingne [told](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/19/western-leaders-ebola-outbreak-africa-medecins-sans-frontieres) the _Guardian_, comparing it with the rapid international response to the earthquake in Haiti, where 300,000 people died. “You need very senior people with high profiles, the kind of people who can coordinate a response to a million people affected by an earthquake.” A million people are currently residing in quarantined regions and are at risk of not receiving adequate supplies of food and water, although the World Health Organization [said](http://www.france24.com/en/20140819-ebola-death-toll-west-africa-WHO/) Tuesday that it had started delivering food aid to hospitalized patients and quarantined districts, in cooperation with the World Food Program. This aid will continue for another three months. However, the biggest unmet need is for additional well-trained health workers. Professionals on the ground are exhausted, and several hundred have died in part because of a lack of training. MSF and other organizations are stretched to breaking point, some of them because of their involvement in other crises. USAID, for example, is [responding](https://www.devex.com/news/how-usaid-is-responding-to-ebola-in-west-africa-84181) to four humanitarian crises at the same time: South Sudan, Syria, Iraq and the Ebola outbreak. It must also weigh up whether to put people at risk. “There may be a lot of well-intentioned medical staff in the world, but this is Ebola,” DART leader Tim Callaghan [told](https://www.devex.com/news/how-usaid-is-responding-to-ebola-in-west-africa-84181) the development web site Devex. MSF president Dr. Joanne Liu told [told](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/world/africa/ebola-is-disaster-of-scale-still-unknown-relief-official-says.html?%5Fr=0) the New York _Times_ that it is also more difficult to recruit medical professionals to deal with Ebola than for any other emergency, because of the risk of infection and the dangers of giving constant care to the patients. “You have to learn to live with fear,” she said_._ ## Transcript This Ebola outbreak is unprecedented. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The bugs have evolved. The outbreak has gotten bigger. We are only as strong as the weakest link, and we have learned from Ebola that West Africa was a very weak link. [ MUSIC ] There's small clinics, these are like one room places where sick people might go in their house with maybe an auxiliary nurse as some one who has a little bit of medical training, but defiantly not the same standards that we would have here in the US. We're facing 3 main threats. The first is the threat of new organisms. It was coming and spreading in different places. The second is drug- resistant bacteria, and the third are intentionally created organisms. What we do in an outbreak response is continuously see how can we make it better. The exercises we've gone through both, re- evaluating our own protocols but also understanding what the public and governmental responses are has really helped us understand. How to take care of these patients in the larger context of our healthcare systems. And, those who are in the building, I would urge you to come down to either the ops team room, or the, When designing a unit that is designed to accept patients with serious communicable diseases, like Ebola, there are ways to design a unit so that it's function. Functional. Any hospital that can isolate a patient in a single patient room with a bathroom and can follow our infection control recommendations is capable of safely caring for a patient with Ebola. And we've tried to encourage every single hospital in the country to have an antibiotic stewardship program to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. There is a concern about fatigue as we go on that, the CDC other groups have sort of ramping up now to try to surge resources into the area. What we're also realizing is, we need to be able to maintain that surge for many months to keep the pressure on to completely control the outbreak. Time will tell in the next few weeks if we can start to see those numbers going in the right direction. Fewer new cases each day or each week. The single most important thing to understand about protecting Americans from Ebola is that can best be done by stopping it at the source in Africa. Its normal to be scared of something as deadly as Ebola and for the general public I really hope we can never let our fear undermine our compassion. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/"},"headline":"Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak","datePublished":"2014-08-20T09:49:29.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:06:38.239Z","description":"Countries are securing their own borders and leaving West Africa to fend for itself","url":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/","keywords":["Infectious Disease","Aid","ebola","Liberia"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt27ac549249045789/6986a028e53aba857c4d4149/ebola-liberia3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Per Liljas","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/per-liljas/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt27ac549249045789/6986a028e53aba857c4d4149/ebola-liberia3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Liberia Battles Spreading Ebola Epidemic","caption":"A Liberian burial team wearing protective clothing retrieves the body of a 60-year-old Ebola victim from his home on Aug. 17, 2014 near Monrovia, Liberia.","creditText":"John Moore—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/infectious-disease/","name":"Infectious Disease"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/","name":"Aid Group Slams Global Response to Ebola Outbreak"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","description":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/G194AmTC/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-13T23:41:12.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/","duration":"PT2M32S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3147485/west-africa-ebola-global-aid-response-doctors-without-borders-brice-de-le-vingne/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```