Obama Names Ebola Czar

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is naming Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden

Obama has been under pressure to name an Ebola "czar" to oversee health security in the U.S. and actions to help stem the outbreak in West Africa.

Klain has been out of government since leaving Biden's office during the Obama's first term. The White House said that Klain would report to national security adviser Susan Rice and to homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco.

Klain, a lawyer, also served as chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore. He previously served under Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton administration.

Also today, the World Health Organization admitted that it botched attempts to stop the now-spiraling Ebola outbreak in West Africa, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.

"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," WHO said in a draft internal document obtained by The Associated Press, noting that experts should have realized that traditional infectious disease containment methods wouldn't work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.

The U.N. health agency acknowledged that, at times, even its own bureaucracy was a problem. It noted that the heads of WHO country offices in Africa are "politically motivated appointments" made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency's chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.

WHO is the U.N.'s specialized health agency, responsible for setting global health standards and coordinating the global response to disease outbreaks.

In late April, during a teleconference on Ebola among infectious disease experts that included WHO, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questions were apparently raised about the performance of WHO experts, as not all of them bothered to send Ebola reports to WHO headquarters.

The Ebola outbreak already has killed 4,484 people in West Africa and WHO says within two months, there could be new 10,000 cases of Ebola every week unless more measures to fight the outbreak are taken.

When Doctors Without Borders began warning in April that the Ebola outbreak was out of control, a dispute on social media broke out between the charity and a WHO spokesman, who insisted the outbreak was under control.

" There were a lot of mistakes made by WHO but a lot of the best public health minds would have thought we could handle this in July," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

"By the time we realized how bad things were, the genie was already out of the bottle," he said.

Osterholm said the U.N. health agency was far from the only organization to blame.

"If we fault WHO for the early dropping of the ball, the whole world has dropped the ball in some sense," he said. "Nobody is to blame because everybody is to blame."