No, he didn’t pick a peck of pickled peppers. He “co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976“. And in 2015, just now, he said this:

“Our world is getting more vulnerable to big epidemics, because of population expansion, huge mobility and more intense contact between animals and people.

“My concern,” he said, “is that when [the Ebola outbreak] is over we will just forget about it. We need to be better prepared and we need to invest in vaccines and treatment.

“It’s like a fire brigade – you don’t start to set up a fire brigade when some house is on fire.”