With Ebola finally arriving in New York City and a lingering sense of uncertainty as to whether Americans should not worry about the disease at all or retreat to an underground bunker for the next five years, Seahawks owner Paul Allen has decided to try to stem the tide of a disease that, while still very new to our country, continues to ravage West Africa.
Via the New York Times, Allen has donated $100 million to the fight against Ebola.
“Everybody feels called sometimes to really pursue a certain thing that resonates with them, and this has resonated with me,” Allen said. “The exponential nature of the growth of this disease is really a challenge — we’ve already seen in the U.S. where one case quickly became two.”
Allen also has created the TackleEbola.com website, where donations much smaller than $100 million can be made for small, specific projects.
Regardless of whether Ebola ever becomes a serious public health situation in America (and as best I can tell while monitoring the Internet from my underground bunker is that it won’t), it is a serious public health situation in various other countries that lack sophisticated medical facilities and/or a basic public understanding of what the disease is and how it spreads. So we applaud Allen for his generosity (after all, $100 million is still $100 million, no matter how much money a guy has), and we encourage everyone to make a donation to one of the various projects being funded by TackleEbola.com.