Protect Our Care isn’t alone. Alarm is rightly growing over the grave vacuum of leadership and expertise at the Trump Health Department that’s left the nation ill-prepared to deal with public health threats like hantavirus and measles:
- Associated Press: FDA chief’s resignation widens a leadership gap at the nation’s health department: When the week began, several senior positions at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were already sitting empty. There was no Senate-confirmed U.S. surgeon general. The head of the National Institutes of Health was doubling as the acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Food and Drug Administration lacked a permanent vaccine chief after that official was ousted for a second time in a year. Then on Tuesday Dr. Marty Makary resigned as head of the FDA, leaving another major health agency with only an acting commissioner. […] But critics say the level of upheaval in the current HHS is unusual and the lack of scientific expertise among its leadership is concerning.
“It’s a sign that something is not right in this department,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, a former senior employee at the CDC.Critics say the problem has only been compounded by a raft of cuts and firings and by the broader disruption brought by Kennedy’s health policies. […] [Kyle] Diamantas was tapped by Trump to lead the FDA on an acting basis. He is also serving as a chief counselor to Kennedy. An attorney and friend of Donald Trump Jr, he is the first person in more than a half-century to head the FDA without a degree in medicine or science.“Kyle Diamantas now has a nearly impossible charge,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, a former FDA official now at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Leading, as a non-scientist, a science-based agency under an unqualified secretary who puts his own medical and nutritional pet peeves over evidence-based public health.”[…]
Still, as the leadership turmoil creates a vacuum within the nation’s health agencies, Kennedy has remained prominent at the top as a voice for them all. That worries Jernigan, who said Kennedy won’t always center the best science in his decisions.
“The driver for the secretary is the ideology,” Jernigan said. “And that’s not a strategy for really improving the health of Americans.”
- South Florida Sun Sentinel (Editorial): An outbreak of federal health incompetence: It was May 7 before the CDC sent a team to “assess exposure risk,” and make monitoring recommendations. By then, three passengers had died. Several more were sick. Passengers from other countries were already flying home on government planes, where the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland and France were quarantining citizens and tracing their contacts. […] Long before the hantavirus started burning through this cruise ship, the CDC was recklessly making all cruises less safe. This is of particular importance in South Florida, where 4.7 million cruise passengers went through Port Everglades alone last year.
That includes the Caribbean Princess, sailing from Fort Lauderdale. It returned to Port Canaveral Monday after 115 passengers and crew fell ill with norovirus. Last year, 18 cruise ships reported norovirus cases. But after RFK Jr. was sworn in, the CDC fired every full-time inspector in its Vessel Sanitation Program. Research money to study the only hantavirus transmitted from person to person — the same strain that broke out on the cruise ship — dried up. […]Then Trump cut all ties with WHO, ending decades of international cooperation on identifying, containing and treating diseases. Instead, the administration is making deals with individual countries. It’s a recipe for putting America last. WHO has 150 field offices worldwide and more than 190 member nations. As of April, the Trump administration had 31. […]
The CDC owes Americans health — not potentially lethal misinformation. RFK Jr. has never been up to the task; not with measles or autism or vaccines and now with the hantavirus outbreak. Instead, he has overseen a dangerous vacuum of fact leading to an abundance of dangerous fiction. Once the COVID treatment of choice for conspiracy theorists, the horse dewormer ivermectin is back, now flouted online by former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others as a hantavirus remedy. It’s enough to make you sick.
- CNBC: Hantavirus outbreak isn’t another Covid pandemic – but experts say it’s testing U.S. readiness: But for other experts, the outbreak is raising broader concerns about how equipped the U.S. is to respond to future infectious disease threats, particularly after major cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Trump administration’s move to withdraw from the WHO last year. While experts say the CDC appears to have the hantavirus outbreak under control, some warn that the situation exposed cracks in the nation’s public health infrastructure that could carry greater consequences in the face of a more contagious pathogen.
“I’m not expecting any significant risk to the American public. But if this is a stress test, we failed this,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of public health law at Georgetown University. “Just imagine if this were actually a highly transmissible agent.”
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[S]ome health experts raised concerns about the lack of a more robust response from the CDC under Trump, and raised broader fears about whether the U.S. is prepared for future, more transmissible global health threats.
“CDC has always been at the forefront of global health emergencies – from SARS-CoV-2 to Ebola to Zika,” said Georgetown’s Gostin. “And for this, the CDC is missing in action. Their response has been disjointed and late.”
For decades, the CDC has developed a reputation as the world’s premier public health agency, rapidly coordinating with the WHO and foreign governments during outbreaks. But experts say the agency has been weakened by deep staffing cuts, leadership vacancies and the Trump administration’s decision to sever ties with the WHO. Trump cut roughly 10% of the CDC’s workforce in early 2025, leaving fewer epidemiologists and scientific staff to do boots-on-the-ground work or coordinate responses across governments. There is currently no permanent CDC director or U.S. surgeon general, both positions that play a critical role in responding to disease threats.
“They don’t have the right leadership at the CDC,” said Evans. “They’re sort of on a ship without a captain at the helm, so they’re scrambling a bit and doing the best they can. There are serious concerns about it.”
- STAT (Opinion, Craig Spencer, public health professor and emergency medicine physician at Brown University): The hantavirus is a wake-up call. Will the Trump administration answer it?: Research has taken a similar hit. The U.S. cut hundreds of millions of dollars in research for mRNA vaccines, hobbling the platform best suited to rapidly producing countermeasures for novel pathogens and cancer as well.And last year, NIH cut a grant supporting one of the few American labs studying Andes hantavirus. That cut probably wouldn’t have changed this outbreak’s trajectory, but the symbolism is hard to miss.
The CDC, our preeminent agency built to respond to threats like hantavirus, has been hollowed out alongside the research and our global footprint. Up to a quarter of CDC’s staff is gone. The Epidemic Intelligence Service — the “disease detectives” we would normally send to an event exactly like this one — spent the past year unsure if they were being fired or rehired. Most CDC center directorships are vacant or filled by people new to their roles — the directorship of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the specific center that would lead CDC’s hantavirus response, is among those that has a new acting director.The CDC hasn’t had a permanent director for 15 of the last 17 months. And the acting CDC director, Jay Bhattacharya, is also the director of the NIH, a workload no human can carry well, and certainly not while a novel hantavirus cluster moves across continents. The strains have been apparent in how this is all being communicated to an anxious American public, or in some cases, not being communicated at all.
- Salon: Hantavirus is a warning. The Trump admin isn’t listening: “It’s very much, we hope, under control,” President Donald Trumps said on Thursday when asked about hantavirus. But for many in public health, hope isn’t enough. Experts have expressed concern that many Trump admin officials who are tasked with ensuring there isn’t another COVID — like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services — are missing from the public eye while the WHO picks up the slack.
“We have seen large-scale funding and workforce cuts made in the last year, not just to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but to global health. Our withdrawal from WHO, our decimation of USAID and also cuts to scientific research,” Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s CEO, said on May 7. “So all of these things are having really profound ripple effects. This is a situation where you really are seeing crystallized the need for bio preparedness.”
- The Hill: Marty Makary’s tenure as head of FDA ends with ‘difficulty’: Makary’s exit leaves yet another vacant senior position in the health department, where there’s no permanent surgeon general or director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Makary’s predecessor lamented that his exit is evidence of the ongoing chaos within the agency.
“I think the continued upheaval at FDA has been detrimental to the agency, not just the speculation about Marty’s fate, but also the departures that we’ve seen from the agency,” former Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who served during Trump’s first administration, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”“The agency’s lost thousands of medical reviewers, some voluntary through the — through the DOGE cuts, or some forced through the DOGE cuts. … There’s been a lot of voluntary departures from the agency.” […]
Trump said Tuesday that Diamantas would “temporarily” lead the FDA until someone else is found. Diamantas’s detractors argue he lacks the necessary experience to be the FDA’s top food regulator, let alone acting head of the entire agency. A Vanity Fair profile on him published last year described his prior stated experience as a “study in brevity.”
The progressive healthcare advocacy group Protect Our Care called Diamantas “a thirty-something lawyer whose qualifications for such a critical public health role seem to begin and end at being Don Jr.’s ‘hunting buddy.’”
- Rolling Stone: Trump Taps Don Jr.’s 38-Year-Old Turkey-Hunting Pal to Lead FDA: How you get from hunting turkeys with the president’s son, to overseeing 1,000 employees in the FDA’s human foods program, to serving as acting FDA commissioner is a story whose outlines have become familiar throughout Trump’s second administration, where being buddies with the right people is a qualification in and of itself.
- STAT: The wish list for the next [FDA] commissioner could make it even harder to fill the role: STAT asked seven FDA employees how they felt about Makary’s departure. All said they were heartened by his exit as they hoped the agency might return to normal. They hoped that his allies who remain and have caused turmoil in scientific centers, like acting drug center director Tracy Beth Høeg, would leave, too.
But they worried about who would come next. The political pressures weighing on Makary will bear on the next commissioner as well. How will they handle potential pushes from health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to unleash untested peptides or White House pressure related to mifepristone, the abortion drug, and flavored vapes?
“It would be nice if the next commissioner supported the review teams, followed standard regulatory processes, and wasn’t beholden to political pressures,” said one employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal. “But with the current administration that will likely be difficult.” […]It will continue to be a difficult, controversial job. Wayne Pines, a former senior leader at FDA, said he expected the administration will struggle to find someone who wants to take on the role.
“It’s hard to find anyone who wants a job with that level of controversy and drama,” Pines said.
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