Zuckerberg and wife give $25m to fight Ebola
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are donating $25m to the non-profit arm of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to help fight Ebola.
Zuckerberg and wife: Fighting ebola
The news, revealed in an emailed statement from the CDC Foundation, will see the grant from Zuckerberg and Chan’s donor-adviser fund at Silicon Valley Community Foundation, put towards the CDC’s Ebola response in the three West African countries most affected -- Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to Bloomberg and “anywhere in the world where Ebola poses a threat to health.”
“We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn’t spread further and become a long-term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post today.
“We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome.”
The gift from Zuckerberg and Chan, who is herslf a physician, will provide “flexible funding allowing CDC to address the most pressing needs as the epidemic shifts and evolves," Charles Stokes, president and chief executive of the CDC Foundation, said in the statement:
The grants will target frontline responders who are setting up care centers, training staff in Africa and identifying Ebola cases, Zuckerberg said.
The CDC Foundation, chartered by Congress, is a private, nonprofit organization classified as public charity, not a division of the CDC.
Zuckerberg is the 13th richest person in the world, with $32bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.