President Obama abruptly canceled political trips to New Jersey and Connecticut for a fundraiser and a rally Wednesday to instead preside over a White House meeting of cabinet agencies coordinating a response to the Ebola outbreak.
In a terse press advisory, the White House gave no indication whether new information prompted what was only described as a “late afternoon” meeting on Ebola, nor did it immediately divulge who would be attending.
Obamas was to headline a U.S. Senate fundraiser in New Jersey, then go to Bridgeport Central High School for his first political rally of the 2014 campaign season.
Mark Bergman, a spokesman for the campaign of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said the expectation was that Obama would come another day.
“He’s going to reschedule. It happened very quickly,” Bergman said.
The meeting was scheduled after a second nurse in Texas was diagnosed with the disease, prompting health officials to begin tracking 132 persons who shared a plane with the nurse a day before she began showing symptoms.
Both nurses had treated Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola a week ago after arriving in Dallas from Liberia, one of the countries in West Africa hardest hit by an outbreak blamed for more than 4,000 deaths.