In a public demonstration intended to calm the Ebola fear gripping Americans, President Barack Obama on Friday gave a bear hug to a Texas nurse who has just got rid of the deadly virus that she contracted while attending to a liberian victim.
Obama, who has been trying to convince a jittery public that it is not easy to catch the Ebola virus except through bodily fluids of a victim, invited Nina Pham to the White House soon after she was cured of Ebola at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington.
The White House promptly released photographs of Obama hugging the nurse as part of the president’s confidence-building exercise that came just a day after New York City was on Ebola alert with a doctor testing positive. The afflicted doctor, put in isolation in a city hospital, was reported to be in stable condition.
“Here’s the bottom line. Patients can beat this disease. And we can beat this disease. But we have to stay vigilant,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday.