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Bloomberg View

With the death toll from Ebola surpassing 5,100 and the disease threatening to spread in Mali, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden asked leaders of religious and humanitarian groups to lobby for emergency aid.

“The emergency funding request the president has on the Hill right now, I’m going to be perfectly honest, we need you” to push for it, Biden said at a meeting at the White House today with about 30 leaders involved in fighting Ebola. “The more you continue your advocacy for the need for this emergency funding,” the better its chances will be.

The White House is pushing Congress to approve $6.2 billion.

In addition to stemming the virus in West Africa, Congress approving the money now would equip U.S. states to treat patients who seek care, Biden said. There are sure to be more cases in the U.S., Ron Klain said in his first public remarks since he was named on Oct. 17 to coordinate the U.S. response to Ebola.

“We will see other cases of Ebola here in the U.S.,” he said.

Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, today blamed World Health Organization policy for the outbreak spiraling into the worst Ebola epidemic ever, sickening more than 14,000 people.

“The United States has generously provided support to the WHO,” Royce said in his opening statement for a hearing today on the international response to Ebola. “This was a failure of policy -– not resources.”

Work to combat Ebola in the countries where it’s hit most frequently -- Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea -- is “ pretty much” on the schedule the United Nations set on Oct. 1, to have 70 percent of burials done safely and 70 percent of cases treated, Jeanine Cooper, senior adviser to the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, said.

Cooper, in an interview in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, today, called the U.S. military work on Ebola in Liberia “a game changer.”