A paroxysm is coming. Trump and RFK Jr. have broken the CDC, and once again, people will die

Ebola virus: Baylor College of Medicine

Lost in the shuffle last week during the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez and four of the top officials at the agency is the fact that the Trump budget for next year will completely eliminate the division of the CDC devoted to outbreaks of disease around the world.

Do you remember the panic back in 2013 and 2014 over the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, principally in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia? Secondary infections hit several health workers who returned to the U.S. and Spain, but the disease was contained by the expenditure of $2 billion by the U.S. through CDC labs and disease surveillance, the World Health Organization and USAID.

Naturally, one of the first things Trump did after taking office was order the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, end any further funding of WHO, and pull all U.S. government personnel and contractors out of working with WHO. So, there went any collaboration between the U.S. government and the World Health Organization over future pandemics or deadly disease outbreaks like Ebola.

But he wasn’t finished. Trump ordered all future health spending to be dedicated to “America first.” That led to severe cuts in CDC divisions and programs dedicated to international health cooperation. Trump eliminated the Maternal and Child Health Branch of the CDC, which worked with foreign countries to ensure that pregnant mothers receive HIV treatment so their babies would not be born infected. In 2024 alone, the CDC Maternal and Child Health Branch (MCHB) treated 300,000 children with HIV and treated 380,000 HIV positive pregnant and breast-feeding women.

According to NPR, Trump ordered staff cuts of 23 percent at the CDC’s Global Health Center and a 25 percent cut in contracts for the entire agency. He removed the director of the Global Health Center and assigned her to a minor job in the Indian Health Service, along with several other directors of CDC divisions, leaving the departments leaderless. Seven of the 15 branches within Global Health devoted to HIV prevention and treatment of Tuberculosis were eliminated.

The closing of USAID and its outposts in Africa and around the world eliminated a place of contact used by the Global Health Center to monitor the spread of infectious diseases around the world. Secretary of State Marco Rubio scrambled to reinstate funding for PEPFAR, the USAID program credited with saving the lives of 25 million people suffering from HIV since the inception of the program in 2003. But the damage was done. The only part of PEPFAR with expertise in maternal and childhood HIV treatment was connected to the Maternal and Child Health Branch of the CDC. That’s now gone.

But it’s next year’s budget that does the real damage to U.S. outreach overseas when it comes to deadly disease outbreaks, immunization, and monitoring the spread of infectious diseases.

The main account for funding of Global Health Programs across Health and Human Services, the State Department, and the CDC will be cut from its current funding of $10 billion per year to $3.8 billion. HIV/AIDS funding, including PEPFAR, will be cut by $2 billion, from current funding at $4.8 billion to $2.9 billion. Maternal and Child Health will be cut from $1.3 billion to $85 million, a 93 percent reduction. Global Health Security, which includes funding for epidemic preparedness and an emergency fund for outbreaks like Ebola, will be cut from $700 million to $200 million.

The following divisions of the CDC Global Health Center will be zeroed-out: Global HIV/AIDS, Global Tuberculosis, Global immunization, Global funding for polio prevention, and immunization for measles and other diseases. The funding for Global Health Protection and Disease Detection and Emergency Response is the only division other than Global Malaria that will see continued funding at 2025 levels.

These are the dry numbers of budgeting, but when you look at charts for the Fiscal 2026 Trump budget and you see $0.00 for budget lines such as “Vulnerable Children,” “Neglected Tropical Diseases,” the “United Nations Population Fund,” “Polio” and “Immunization,” the picture becomes crystal clear.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump, in the name of America First, or whatever the hell their slogan of the day is, are imagining this country as if it’s a Medieval castle, and all they’ve got to do is dig a deeper moat and build higher stone walls, and we can scare those nasty pathogens away.

COVID flew into the United States on an international flight from China to Seattle. Three years later, more than one million Americans had been killed by the virus.

Trump seems to have the MAGA faithful fooled. His approval rating hovers somewhere between 36 and 46 percent, depending on the poll and the date it is taken. They have already limited COVID vaccines to those over 65 or people who have preexisting health conditions making them more vulnerable to the disease, but those people must go to a physician, if they have one, and get a prescription for the vaccination, and even then, most insurers will not cover it, further limiting who will actually reeceive the COVID vaccine.

In mid-September, Kennedy’s eviscerated vaccine panel will have its official meeting. Afterwards, we will be informed which other vaccines are not longer on the list mandating coverage by insurance plans. If they treat vaccines in this country like they are treating vaccines internationally – cutting funding for them altogether – we are likely to see epidemics of diseases we thought had been either eliminated completely or nearly so. It’s not out of the question for Kennedy’s lunatic antivax panel to eliminate coverage of the polio vaccine, one of the great American health success stories of the last century.

And then there is the elimination of expertise in science, medical research and epidemiology across a broad swath of diseases and chronic medical conditions. Kennedy wanted to eliminate 10,000 jobs from Health and Human Services, including the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and other agencies within the department. Some who were fired early in the administration were ordered reinstated by judges, and some have been rehired when their agencies realized what a gross mistake had been made. Notices have gone out to hundreds more that their suspensions are lifted, and they are being “invited” to come back to work. So, Kennedy’s house-cleaning didn’t work…except at the CDC, where there have been continuing cuts in funding for laboratories doing essential research into environmental health, sexually transmitted diseases, and viral hepatitis. Kennedy himself last week told the world that vaccines for Hepatitis B were not for children, but for “homosexual men and prostitutes.”

That kind of talk is discouraging people from getting vaccines for their children and themselves. Cuts to funding for international health initiatives and withdrawal from the WHO is a disaster in waiting.

Something very big and very bad is festering out there in a desert or a forest or a stream or on a farm. An infected bat or a chicken or a pigeon or a hawk is going to drop the husk of a seed or a scrap of fruit or a bit of uneaten garbage. It will be consumed by a land mammal, which may be bitten by a mosquito or a fly. The mosquito will bite a human, or the fly will produce larvae that feed on and infect compost that will be spread on a crop or leak into a water source…and off we’ll go.

There will be nobody to report from a dusty little office in Nairobi or Oman or Pakistan, because Trump shut down USAID and defunded the CDC Global Health Center. Even if information comes in from abroad that something is seriously wrong, the people who know what that information means will have been fired, and the new “leaders” will be former anti-vax podcasters or Fox News hosts. They won’t know what to do, so it will happen over there, and then it will happen here, and Kennedy will still be yapping that vaccines will kill you, and Trump will start pumping up stock in Ivermectin, and people will get sick and start dying.