Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, who recently returned from a trip to Liberia, said Sunday that the Pentagon should avoid prematurely withdrawing U.S. military personnel who are fighting the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
"We can't declare mission accomplished and withdraw too early here," Coons said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "The raging epidemic that threatened the whole country in September is now down to a few embers scattered across this country but we need a new strategy to adapt to conditions on the ground. Our troops should remain, some of them to the rest of the year, to help make sure that Liberians can transition our emergency Ebola treatment units into community health clinics and transition our high tech military mobile testing labs into Liberian-run local labs so that going forward this epidemic is really brought to an end in Liberia."
Coons said about 1,000 or more of the troops could return home because they have finished their primary missions of building the infrastructure to test for Ebola. But the money that the U.S. continues to spend on the epidemic could be spent more wisely with a change in strategy, he said
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Residents in Freetown, Sierra Leone, break rocks in a road project that was halted because of concern about Ebola. In Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, Ebola continues to lay waste not just to immune systems but also to balance sheets. Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
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