Ebola was the top focus on Sunday’s morning news shows.
Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the rounds on Sunday, hitting nearly all the major network programs to discuss the U.S. response to the disease.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Frieden admitted Ebola was spreading so quickly in Africa that it was “hard to keep up.”
However, the United States and other nations are achieving an effective response to the disease in West Africa, he said, though he admitted that “it’s going to take time.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Frieden also said the “drug pipeline is going to be slow” — meaning creating drugs for or a vaccine against the virus is a difficult process.
“We will stop it in its tracks,” Frieden said on ABC’s “This Week,” noting the CDC is being proactive in its approach to control the outbreak to bring the risk in the U.S. to zero.
Fauci admitted on “Fox News Sunday” he believes someone who came in contact with the Dallas Ebola patient could eventually come down with the disease. Yet the U.S. “won’t have an outbreak,” he said.
“Because of our healthcare system and our ability to do the contact tracing and isolation, we won’t have an outbreak,” Fauci said.
On “Face the Nation,” Fauci reiterated that the Ebola situation in Dallas is under control.
On “Meet the Press,” senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer emphasized the administration’s proactive response to stop Ebola “at its source.”
“But people should know that in every one of those situations you mentioned, where a problem arises, we deal with it quickly, we deal with it forcefully to make sure it doesn’t happen,” he said, dismissing critics who have questioned the administration’s handling of the disease thus far.
