Trail Blazers and Seahawks owner Paul Allen has thrown his name into the fight against the Ebola epedemic. According to The New York Times, Allen has donated $100 million to the crisis.
The amount roughly quadruples his earlier commitment of about $26 million to nonprofit groups and government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making him one of the largest individual donors in the Ebola crisis.
“Everybody feels called sometimes to really pursue a certain thing that resonates with them, and this has resonated with me,” Mr. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
He said when he first began hearing about the Ebola outbreak in July, he had a “nagging sense” that it could spiral out of control. “We’re up against an extremely tough opponent here,” he said. “The exponential nature of the growth of this disease is really a challenge — we’ve already seen in the U.S. where one case quickly became two.”
Allen also has created the TackleEbola.com website, where donations much smaller than $100 million can be made for smaller projects.
