Understand that dr. Spencer is a hero. That he is doing exactly whats needed to actually bring the epidemic to an end. He is a hero in that he went and did the one thing that we need to do in order to stop more cases from coming not only here but everywhere else. We need to have experienced Health Workers. My understanding is that hes a fellow in International Emergency medicine, which is an extremely good training for Something Like this kind of activity. And the one thing that now we know in these three countries is that we need Health Workers. Theres tremendous work being done, especially by the u. S. And the uk, on building facilities, but its still not clear where the Health Workers are going to come from to provide the treatment, the isolation, the infection and control that we need right now. The epidemic is still growing. Its really hard to get exact numbers on where we are in the three countries, but we know its still growing. And i think any numbers that you might hear, most of them are about, are oriented around thinking how to plan. How big could it get . It doesnt make any sense for me right now to tell you its going to get this big or that big, we really dont know. But i can tell you this for sure, if we do not improve our ground game quickly, lots is being done. Any look back a month and a half, theres so much going on on the ground now that there was not before. But the biggest concern, and this is why dr. Spencers story is so poignant for me, the biggest concern is that well build facilities and then we wont have the workforce to actually put them into use. So with that, let me stop and hand it back to dave and then well talk about anything else that youd like to talk about. Im going to do one or two and then well go to mark sibel, and brett norman from politico to start. Let me take you back to something you said at a reuters event last week. You said in terms of the Global Response to ebola, were not close yet. Were not close in terms of getting it right. Has that assessment changed . Were closer now than even we were last week. So things are moving quickly. Facilities are getting built. Facilities are getting built. Were looking at every single option. You know, i just spoke with margaret chance this morning. She calls me wherever she needs to tell me anything, and she called me to tell me a couple of things. First, they had a very successful meeting on vaccines. But there are several vaccines candidates. Let me just stress that there is no proven vaccine, so we cant be lulled into thinking that a vaccine is going to solve this problem. Even if we did have a vaccine, wed need Health Workers to administer them. But the one thing that wasnt clear is how a vaccine trial, for example, would be worked out. Just yesterday, they had a meeting with the u. S. uk officials from the private sector and they rk wworked that. Things are moving day to day. She just told me, one of the big issues, how do you pay Health Workers . Theyre now working on Electronic Payments for Health Workers. All this tells you that the speed and the momentum of the response is growing, but what she told me this morning and what still remains true is that we donat have enough Health Workers and were not quite sure where theyre going to come from. My guess is youre going to get asked about the u. S. Aspect by other people, so let me ask you something that may not come immediately to mind. And thats what you see as the role of fear and the medias behavior if dealing with all of this. You said in an oped in the washington post, written with your partners and healthco founder, the crisis we are watching unfold arrives less from the virus itself and more from deadly and misinformed biases that have led to a disastrously inadequate response to the outbreak. So, whats your sense of how the medias behaved and whats your sense of the role of feel in dealing with this . Well, i have, you know, the media has varied tremendously. I have seen extremely highquality reports that go into detail about how the virus is transmitted. And ive also seen very sensationalist media reports. You know, we take this fear very seriously, because from the perspective of economics, what weve learned is that 80 to 90 of the Economic Impact of these outbreak has to do with fear and what we call aversion fear, fear than it does with the virus. So the virus can have a relatively limited impact and the fear can have this huge Economic Impact. Thats what happened during the sars epidemic. So one of the things thats really, really critical is to explain and be really accurate and specific about how these things evolve. And thats what they did in new york last night. And in washingtoning at least part of the press conference, i thought that the very clear explanations, both on the part of the Public Health people, but then having applying leaders there, clearly knowing what the facts are, and then reassuring the population, was very important. Now, well see what happens today in new york, but i thought that their handling of the information piece of it was extremely good. And finally for me, theres a study from the world bank on the Economic Impact. And several different cases, one case at the low end, 3. 8 billion, the high case, 32. 6 billion. But that, i guess, assumes that its contained in southwestern africa. What is your sense at the moment. Has your sense of the Economic Impact of this globally changed at all in the last week or two . It all depends on whether we can get the response in place. If you take the perspective of the virus, you know, the most important thing right now is to stop it where its spreading quickly. And there are still parts of the three countries where its spreading quickly. And so, theres really only one way to stop this from continuing to export cases all over the country, i mean, all over the continent, and all over the world. And that is to redouble and redouble and redouble again our efforts on the ground. So the agencies that are supposed to be working on this, the World Health Organization, the u. N. , funding organizations like ourselves, the United States government, the uk, france, and all the other governments, theyve really stepped up their response. But unfortunately, we were late, so, instead of having a few dozen cases, i mean, the largest outbreak to date has been 425 cases in the past, there are more Health Professionals who have been infected than the number of cases than the largest epidemic previously. So were behind, because its moving so quickly, but while there is optimism about whats happened, theres still a long way to go. And if we dont solve the Health Worker problem, all the efforts to date will simply not have the impact that we need to have. Mark . You come to this with an interesting expertise and youre sitting in an interesting position now. What do you see as the world banks role in this, and do you find the organization suited for the vision you have of how it might benefit the situation . The world bank is very involved in financing health. And theres a good reason for that. Larry summers just did a study, it was now 11 months ago, but in january of 2014, Larry Summers published a study that showed that in lowtomiddle income companies, fully 24 of the Economic Growth in low and middle Income Countries from 2000 to 2011 was due to improved health outcomes. So the fact that Life Expectancy went up, that Maternal Mortality went down, that infant mortality went down, those interventions that led to longer life and Better Health outcomes accounted for a quarter of Economic Growth. So were involved in health, because its so important for growth. In this particular case, we have a Crisis Response window. And its one of the only sources of readily available cash that we can move to developing countries. And because the other traditional funders werent stepping up, and because there wasnt a fund that immediately disperses when you have outbreaks like this, we had to become that organization. But heres what were focusing on now. You know, we have weve developed these very interesting instruments. Theyre almost like insurance instruments, and we call them catastrophic drawdown bonds. And what we do is we go into, you know, a country like mexico, and we say, you know, the last time you had an earthquake, it was difficult getting the cash to be able to respond. And so, weve worked out a way that the next time Something Like that happens, there is a big chunk of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, that as soon as they have a disaster, those funds will disperse. So inside our organizations, people started saying, why dont we have Something Like that for outbreaks like this . And so thats what were working on right now. And i think that, for the medium and the longterm, is exactly our role. We can use our balance sheet, we can set up systems of contingent liabilities, so that, you know, a large fund, billions and billions of dollars, can be set up, but will only disperse if theres an emergency like this. Because that was the problem. You know, as much as organizations like msf and others and, you know, other charitable groups have really brought this to everybodys attention, as much as they would have liked to scale up, there wasnt the resources and there wasnt the sort of Health Care Core that was ready to go. We now know we have to build that. So we will work on the financial pieces of it. And our hope is that together with the global community, we can set something up that will work like this. So, lets say something, you know, even worse than ebola, a deadly pandemic flu, for example, breaks out somewhere. If we can get billions of dollars moving right away, then we can bring the emergency Health Worker core into fighting those epidemics where they exist. And if you have a fund like this, our hope is that it would even work as an advanced market signal for vaccines and drugs. Right now, vaccine makers would like to go forward, but its hard for them to find financing, because theyre saying, even if there was an outbreak, would there be any interest in your product or who would pay for it . And this, we hope, could take a step towards answering your question. But even protecting from Downside Risks to the global economy, this is one of the things that i think we really have to do. Just follow up quickly. How much money did the world bank pony up right at the beginning. To really, before anyone else stepped up, we pledged 200 million. And afterwards when we saw it was a much more serious academic, we did 200 million more. So the total pledge is 400 million. Usually this takes months to disperse. Three months is an incredibly rapid dispersement, but once we saw the problem, from the time we took it to our board to the time it was in the three countries, was nine days. Now, normally, we just dont work like that, but this was so crucial that we did it. And this is going to the first 117 million is on the ground, and its paying for everything from supplies to protective gear to Health Worker salaries. We bought ambulances, because ambulances were needed to carry the patients. So were really doing anything thats needed right now, but a big chunk of that money also has to be for Building Back those Health Systems, and also trying to get the economies going. So our private sector arm, ric, has now committed to increasing its activities. You know, the Economic Impact in these three countries has already been devastating. And we now have to really think about rebuilding those economies. All three of them have come out of conflicts over the last decades. And the last thing we need is for this epidemic then to lead into another situation, where they move back into conflict. So were trying to do many things at once, but right now the focus has to be on putting the fire out. Guy . Thanks so much for being here, mr. President. My name is guy taylor from the Washington Times and im probably going to be that guy. Because i want to try to shift the conversation just for a few minutes. And im sure well go back to ebola and try to bring it inside the world bank for a minute. There have been a lot of articles, some ive written, and a number of others here, about unrest among the staff inside the bank. Memos circulating among rank and file economists. Theres one out now thats calling for people to hold a rally in the lobby of the bank every thursday. There have been several such large rallies. Some of these people mostly wont wont give thegive their accusing you on paper of gross mismanagement of restructuring of the bank. I want to give you an opportunity to respond to that publicly, but i specifically wanted to ask, one of the things thats come out is this sense of a kind of culture of fear inside the bank. People complain about this to reporters and i wonder what youre doing to address that. Because budget cuts or reforming and restructuring are one thing, but when a culture of fear takes hold, as everybody in the media, i think, understands, its a difficult thing. Well, when i took the job, in july of 2012, the questions that i was getting, in a pretty pointed way, was, what is the relevance of the world bank today . And the issues that kept coming up were, are you relevant for middleIncome Countries anymore . And one of the things that was worrisome, is that we were reaching what we call our single borrower limit for many of the most recent borrowing countries. In other words, we were running out of space to support middleIncome Countries. The other issue that came up was the sense that as a knowledge institution, we had fallen backwards. That we werent providing state of the art knowledge to all the Different Countries who were our clients. And then what we did is we did a survey of the entire staff. And the survey was extremely critical of the bank as it was. And so the issues we tried to tackle were, how can we continue to be relevant for middleIncome Countries . And the second issue was, how can we ensure that were moving the best Global Knowledge to every country . And one of the things we found, one of the pieces of data that we found were that when we asked technical specialists, how much of your time do you spend providing your Technical Expertise into other regions, because theyre all locked into regions, and it came back about 1 of their time. We knew we had to do a couple of things. Then we looked back historically and talked to everybody in the house and decided we needed to make some pretty fundamental root and branch changes. And when we decided that we were going to do that, i told everybody, to begin, this is going to be really heart, because it hadnt happened for 20 years. There had been really no structural change for 20 years. This talk of moving toward a Global Knowledge system, talk of trying to increase our lending capacity, all of this was on the table, but nothing happened, literally, since 1997. So, when we started in, we tackled a very robust agenda. And we did it in a time of historically low Interest Rates. So historically low Interest Rates affect us, because that means our income is lower. So the only way that we would have been able to do that, to grow our capacity, to lend to middleIncome Countries, and to have Global Knowledge, was at the same time, was to do a review of our expenditures. It turns out that an expenditure review hadnt been done for a long time. And i suspect that all of your organizations have gone through expenditure reviews. We have not for more than a decade. So what the board told us was, we will we will work with you and let you increase your lending capacity and we support the move to go to Global Knowledge groups, but you really have to do something about efficiency and your expenditures. So, the complexity of this is we did it all at once. And the reason we did it all at once, is because each was contingent on the other. You can expand your lending to middleIncome Countries, but you have to go through the expenditure review. And the only reason that they would want more lending is if your knowledge was significantly better. So, were in the middle of this, and you know, people are absolutely, understandably, worried about their jobs. Theyre worried about what the system will look like. And in big, multilateral bureaucracies like ours, when people get used to a way of doing things, no matter how much they may be critical of it, in a survey and tell you that, you know, there are steps that dont need it and et cetera, et cetera, when you change it, its very unsettling. So, we knew that there would be many course corrections that we would have to go through. And were in the middle of a course correction right now. And you know, the rallies have happened, and after one of the rallies, i had a town hall meeting and we spoke about specific issues. And there were some issues that i had i was aware of, but then there were others that were brought to my attention in a very clear way at the town hall. The next week,