Latest news with #OfficeofPandemicPreparednessandResponsePolicy
Atlantic
a day ago
- Health
- Atlantic
How Trump Threw Out the Pandemic Playbook
As of last month, there is no one left in the White House whose sole job is to keep the nation safe from biological threats. The leader of the National Security Council's biosecurity directorate recently resigned. His staff had been pushed out, and his unit is now defunct. The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Congress in 2022, has dwindled from a staff of about 20 under President Joe Biden to a staff of zero. The Trump administration has said that it's just reorganizing the bureaucracy and is prepared to handle biothreats. But our experience suggests otherwise. Without a leader from the NSC embedded in the White House and ready to coordinate other agencies, more people—including Americans—will get sick and die. We have spent years helping lead the U.S. government's efforts to contain the deadliest biological threats. One of us, Beth Cameron, helped found the NSC's biosecurity office, in 2016—created as a response to a deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa that had begun a couple of years earlier. Ebola is a gruesome, highly contagious disease that causes its victims' organs, blood vessels, and immune cells to fail. The average lethality rate is about 50 percent. That outbreak killed more than 11,000 people across West Africa and cost the U.S. government billions of dollars to help contain. Despite our government's best efforts, 11 cases ultimately reached the U.S., and two were fatal. President Donald Trump terminated the NSC's biosecurity office during his first term, but Biden reestablished it—and just in time. In early February 2021, an ominous email came to the White House from federal health officials: reports of Ebola outbreaks in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The cases were close to the borders of Uganda and Rwanda, major travel hubs for the region. The White House was already managing the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crisis. But leaving Guinea and Congo to handle the Ebola outbreaks on their own was risky. So we activated a system developed through hard-learned lessons from past deadly outbreaks, designed to help contain them at their sources and to prepare for the worst at home. We sent public-health professionals to advise the affected countries. We took inventory of vaccines and other supplies so we would be ready to deploy them. We relied on a painstaking system of testing, vaccinations, and predeparture screenings in Congo and Guinea. We ensured that anyone who had been to an affected country and was seeking to come to the U.S. was funneled to one of a handful of American airports. The CDC and the Department of Homeland Security activated a program for tracing and contacting passengers after their arrival. One of us, Jon Finer—the principal deputy national security adviser at the time—led a team of senior health and national-security officials from across the government; it met every day to coordinate all of the moving parts, and to keep the president and other senior officials informed. It worked. The disease was entirely contained within the two source countries—no cases reached the U.S.—and 18 people died, a number that could have been exponentially higher. To strengthen our responses to future pandemics, lawmakers soon established the position of a U.S. coordinator for global health security; one of us, Stephanie Psaki, was the first person to hold that job. They also created the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in the White House. The Trump administration, tasked with upholding the law, is supposed to be staffing these offices. Not only has it failed to do that, but in just six months, it also has dismantled many of the early-warning-and-response systems that were built over decades. In Trump's second term, his team has fired thousands of public-health experts at the CDC, the FDA, and other agencies. It has canceled investments in safeguards against pandemic influenza, undermined confidence in vaccines, and cut funding for potential future outbreaks. It killed USAID and is scaling down the CDC's global role, canceling many of the programs that maintained ties to countries where disease outbreaks occur. It has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization. And it has created confusion about who in the U.S. government is in charge of the system for tracking deadly biothreats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate. Put another way: The second Trump administration inherited a playbook, and then pushed out the people who knew how to run the plays. The United States is dealing with many biological threats at home and abroad, such as the bird flu and measles—with the latter, America is already facing the worst outbreak in decades. Scientists estimate about a 50–50 chance of another pandemic as severe as the coronavirus occurring in the next 25 years. The probability is even higher for smaller-scale threats, such as periodic Ebola outbreaks. Deadly biothreats are more and more likely to emerge for a range of reasons, including increased interaction between humans and animals, labs without sufficient biosecurity systems, easier public access to the information and technology needed to create or manipulate a bioagent, and continued concerns about the development of biological weapons by nefarious actors. The risk of death and economic disruption is only growing. America rebuilt the system of disease detection and response after the first Trump administration damaged it. That will be harder to do this time around. Far more officials have left the government. Will they be willing to come back, given the degree to which their work has been disparaged and their job security eviscerated? Stopping deadly diseases from reaching the United States is challenging at the best of times. Absent trusting relationships and, truth be told, a fair amount of pressure, affected countries aren't always forthcoming with information. (We dealt with one case that required resorting to threats to withhold U.S. support if the other government didn't share more data about an emerging outbreak.) Health imperatives can collide with political ones, such as when a country has to consider restricting travel. Questions can arise about how much of a vaccine or treatment should be shared with other countries, and how much should be kept at home (if a vaccine or treatment exists at all). But these are all reasonable policy debates that assume the system is basically functioning. In a worst-case scenario, we might not even know about a disease until it has started spreading in a major city with an international airport. With no warning, we will have less ability to stop the disease at its source, and less power, if it reaches our shores, to save American lives. The odds of us facing that scenario have now gone way up. This would be a terrible tragedy, and all the more so because it would be self-inflicted.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Is Trump Ready for Bird Flu?
President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America's egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn't outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information. Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump's administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House's Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.) If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump's health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease. Trump's pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines. Many of Trump's health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance. One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn't turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it'll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs. Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission. Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that 'federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.' How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter. Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn't like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease's spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them. The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it 'sounds good politically, but I think it's a very expensive solution to something that won't work.' Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can't really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president's support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d'être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he'd take on. In 2023, he tweeted, 'Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.' In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country's leaders can't be bothered. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
11-02-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
Is Trump Ready for Bird Flu?
President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America's egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn't outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information. Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump's administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House's Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.) If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump's health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease. Trump's pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines. Many of Trump's health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance. One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn't turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it'll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs. Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission. Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that 'federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.' How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter. Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn't like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease's spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them. The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it 'sounds good politically, but I think it's a very expensive solution to something that won't work.' Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can't really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president's support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d'être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he'd take on. In 2023, he tweeted, 'Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.' In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country's leaders can't be bothered.
