The Obama administration has not been treating the growing Ebola crisis with "real seriousness and sobriety," former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Wednesday, adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not being run correctly.
"Look, this administration couldn't run the IRS right, and it apparently isn't running the CDC right," Romney said in an interview with
NH1 News in New Hampshire. "And you ask yourself what it is going to take to have a presdient who really focuses on the interests of the American people."
Romney, who lost the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama, said he is disappointed in how Obama responded to the news that a second Dallas nurse, Amber Vinson, contracted the deadly virus,
reports The Hill. She was one of 77 healthcare workers who treated Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of the disease at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Vinson has been transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment, while Texas Health Presbyterian is treating Nina Pham, the first of Duncan's nurses to contract the disease.
The CDC is coming under fire after
reportedly granting Vinson, 29, permission to return from Cleveland to Dallas on a Frontier Airlines commercial jet, even though she reported having a fever.
Romney did cheer Obama's decision to cancel his campaign appearances on Wednesday, and instead meet with Cabinet-level and senior staff at the White House.
"I'm glad he's stopping campaigning for a couple of days and finally focusing on this, this is serious stuff,” Romney told NH1. “This is the lives of the American people and we have to treat this with real seriousness and sobriety and I don't see that yet."
Obama has also canceled two fundraisers scheduled for today in order to stay in Washington. Meanwhile, on Wednesday he promised the government would be "much more aggressive" responding to Ebola, but he is still refusing to agree to Republican demands to name a "czar" to operate federal efforts or to enforce a travel ban for West Africa.
Romney also agrees a ban should be enforced, admitting that he hasn't been briefed on the reasons not to shut down flights.
"My own reaction is we probably ought to close down the border with nations that have extensive Ebola spreading and that means not bringing flights in from that part of Africa,” Romney said.
The Obama administration and health officials, however, believe a ban could hinder aid efforts for the West African countries hit hardest by Ebola, an argument Romney rejects.
"We could give special visas to healthcare workers to allow them to go there and when they come back, we put them in quarantine until we are sure they don't have Ebola," he commented.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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