Warning Shot

The world is facing outbreaks of both hantavirus and Ebola. The Centers for Disease Control should have been leading the response to these threats. They had the expertise to track, contain, and prevent such potential super-spreader events from going global. Not anymore.

The CDC was gutted by Robert Kennedy Jr’s full-on assault on the American medical establishment. And now, as the White House scrambles to deal with the fallout, Donald Trump has put a Republican loyalist in charge of the response.

Admiral Brian Christine is not only a loyal MAGA ideologue — he hosts a podcast for men who can’t get it up.

No seriously.

This is the state of public health in the United States since Trump bragged that he would let Robert Kennedy Jr “go wild” on public health.

And RFK Jr didn’t let him down.

In the infamous Friday Night Massacre, he fired more than a thousand key employees at the CDC in a single shot — top researchers, immunologists who track the deadly outbreak and even the health inspectors who ensure that cruise ships are safe.

Speaking on MSNBC, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said:

“The CDC is over. It was killed.”

Daskalakis was the former director of the CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who quit in protest at the gutting of the Centers for Disease Control.

“This administration only knows how to break things. They have made America at risk for outbreaks and attacks by nefarious players. People should be scared.”

Now we are seeing the result.

The outbreak of a mysterious illness aboard the cruise ship HV Aldius was the kind of nightmare scenario that the Centers for Disease Control had prepared for decades.

A cruise ship represents the perfect test case for a super-spreader event. Hundreds of people are confined together for the period of incubation for a deadly illness, and then are dropped off in multiple countries of origin to spread the illness on their return.

But when the outbreak occurred, the staff at the CDC were so gutted that it took the United States a week to admit it publicly.

The Intercept reports that the CDC failed to tell New York health officials that a woman who had been let off the stricken cruise ship was wandering freely about New York without the need to quarantine.

In working to contain the damage, Trump turned to Admiral Brian Christine, a man with no background in public health and infectious diseases.

So what makes him qualified to deal with this deadly illness?

Turns out he donated to Trump’s campaign.
Tick box one.

He railed against President Biden’s Democrats for being like Nazis.
Tick box two.

And he hosted a show called Erection Connection.
Tick box three.

That’s the state of public health one and a half years into RFK Jr.’s attack on the medical establishment.

I have written about the Kakistocracy now in place – a 16th-century term for government by the worst possible people. Nobody could fit that role more perfectly than RFK Jr.

The hantavirus outbreak occurs as a deadly new strain of Ebola has hit Central Africa. So far, there have been over 500 cases and fears that is is spreading rapidly. What makes the Bundibugyo virus strain of Ebola worrisome is that there is no known cure.

Will it be a flash in the pan, or could it spread to a much larger outbreak? At this point, it is too early to say. And if it did spread, it could easily spread globally.

This is why there has been such vigilance over the last decades between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control, which have been the gold standard in the fight to contain deadly contagions.

The CDC was the global front line in responding to potential super-spreader events. They have been seriously weakened, leaving us open to very dangerous threats.

But in Canada, we have our own problems.

A recent poll found that 25% of Canadians are now reluctant to get vaccinated. In Alberta, that number jumped to 35%.

It may not be hantavirus or Ebola that pose the new generation of threats, but the return of old-fashioned monsters that had long been put into the crypt — measles, rubella, diphtheria, influenza. The victims will largely be children and the elderly.

I wonder what Albert Camus would say if he were witnessing this. In the book The Plague, he warned:

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

There should have been no surprise that by gutting the research and warning systems, we have put ourselves in this crisis. The solution?

“There is no question of heroism in this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.”

The decency of politicians putting the public interest above ideology.

The decency of people being vaccinated not just for their own health but for others.

The decency of understanding that we are all in this together.

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