Public Health, Power & Security What Ebola Taught Susan Rice About the Next Pandemic

Our Director of Communications and Research, John Gans, is cited in this article on former National Security Advisor and former PWH Distinguished Visiting Fellow Susan Rice.

In October 2014, national security adviser Susan Rice was steeling herself to resign.

Ten months into a vicious outbreak of Ebola, a terrifying virus that caused some victims to bleed from their eyeballs, the United States was struggling to contain its spread across West Africa. The disease had seemed to vanish in the spring only to return with a vengeance in June, to the surprise of health experts. The World Health Organization and international NGOs had proven unequal to the task...

...Six years later, another epidemic is raging, this time in the U.S., with Trump himself in the White House and seemingly unable—or unwilling—to slow it down. Rice, now a private citizen, has emerged as a leading prospect for vice president, a job whose responsibilities are likely to include a laser focus on stopping the spread of Covid-19...

“Ebola wasn’t gonna fall off the map because of who she was and how she saw the world and what she believed in,” John Gans, Jr., a scholar of the National Security Council, said of Rice...

Rice, herself an NSC aide during the Clinton administration, had been careful to surround herself with career officials who had deep working relationships within the agencies they came from...Those relationships gave Rice’s staff what Gans called “the ability to call around and get ground truth.” They could dial up their counterparts deep in the bowels of, say, the Pentagon, and find out what untapped capabilities the military was keeping under wraps.

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