Passengers disembark MV Hondius, ship hit by hantavirus, on May 10, 2026 in Tenerife
When ominous reports of a highly lethal and potentially communicable illness reach our airwaves, Americans now must rely on foreign authorities to reassure us — or to warn us.
The hantavirus is at our doorstep, but the Trump administration, and specifically its top health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have dismantled the federal scientific infrastructure that traditionally protected the nation from such threats and substituted literally nothing in its place. While we may escape the direst consequences of their vandalism for the moment, there is no guarantee that far worse is not coming, and soon.
The ruinous public health impact of Donald Trump's return to the White House was just as predictable as his rush to enrich himself and his family by every corrupt means. We knew what he is because we saw what he was. His historic failure to competently manage the COVID-19 pandemic mostly occurred in plain sight, as he tried to ignore and then downplay a deadly onslaught of which he had been duly warned.
With his presidential messaging warped by egomania, Trump promised that the spreading pandemic would swiftly and "miraculously" fade away. He knew that was a lie but resisted a sound public testing program because he didn't want "bad numbers" as the election season began. He failed to provide critically needed hospital supplies as doctors and nurses died. And he undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidance on safety protocols while promoting quack cures, comic-book science, and loony ideas like "injecting" bleach.
Trump's mindless, chaotic response led to many thousands of unnecessary deaths, for which he somehow mostly escaped blame, while right-wing media demonized veteran public health officials. And all that insanity occurred while responsible federal officials were still in office — meaning before Kennedy got the chance to pursue his impulse to destroy the public health edifice that required decades to build.
That course of destruction accelerated as soon as Trump and Kennedy took over last year, although the dismantling had begun during the first Trump administration. Within weeks after his second inauguration, the president signed an executive order terminating United States membership in the World Health Organization, a token of his pig-ignorant attitude about the global vectors of diseases that know no borders. At the same time, he ended U.S. observance of International Health Regulations that govern cross-border investigations of disease outbreaks like COVID-19, Ebola and now hantavirus.
Trump's malign commands are not only leading to the deaths of millions of innocent people in other countries, suddenly deprived of essential medicines and care, but now are jeopardizing American access to vital, timely, lifesaving information. Whatever capable officials are still left in our government can no longer see the WHO surveillance databases or communicate with its working groups of doctors and scientists — who played a major part in our defense against Ebola during the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, Trump's sycophant Kennedy has directed an even more damaging reign of ruin on the systems that protect us within our own borders. Apparently motivated by an urge for vengeance on the CDC, which thwarted his anti-vaccine propaganda, Kennedy ousted nearly a third of the agency's employees. Among the functions most harmed by his stupid waves of firing and rehiring was the renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service, whose medical detectives are trained to investigate and assess infectious outbreaks like hantavirus (or, to take another topical example, the measles epidemic conjured by Kennedy's anti-vax imbecility).
According to Dr. Celine Gounder, everyone who worked for the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program, which monitors cruise ship health conditions, cashiered all its full-time civilian workers in early 2025. (Most of them were later rehired.) Only an idiot would imagine that the government should save money by ruining such precious public services.
The demoralizing impact of Trump and Kennedy on American public health will take a toll that has scarcely been felt yet.
"I hope it's fine," said the president when asked about the hantavirus on Sunday. This time it probably will be. But his halting answer was an eerie echo of what he said in January 2020 — before he and his stooges demolished the best public health system in the world.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.
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