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The Best of Us, at the Worst of Times
by Reid Wilson ’01, National Correspondent for The Hill
n February 2015, the White House team managing the American response to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa gathered an unusually eclectic group of people to meet President Barack Obama. They included two young doctors, one a Christian missionary, the other a liberal idealist from New York; two older missionaries who had worked in a health clinic in Liberia; and two young nurses, one Asian American and one African American.
They may have had little in common on the surface, but each bore the scars of the Ebola virus they had survived. Two White House officials in the room that day told me they were struck by the diversity on display. Here, they said, was the best of America—old and young, conservative and liberal, white, black, Asian, all of whom had put themselves in harm’s way to help others. That story, more than just about any other, has stuck with me in the years after I wrote Epidemic: Ebola and the Global Scramble to Prevent the Next Killer Outbreak, chronicling the American and international response to an outbreak that hit three of the world’s most impoverished countries, claiming at least 11,300 lives and scarring tens of thousands more. It shows that, for all the faults and warts we have as a people, Americans are fundamentally good, and the worst moments bring out the best in us. It’s been important for me to remember those people as a new deadly virus races across the globe. The coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China late last year presents a fundamentally different challenge to the world—in short, it’s a much smarter virus, one that keeps its host alive long enough to find new fuel and perpetuate its own existence in a way that Ebola does not. But it is bringing out the same strain of human decency and innovation that Americans tend to show in moments of crisis.
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