Washington D.C. – With the Ebola crisis in East Africa ‘rapidly escalating’, the NYT reports: ‘Public health experts around the world and health workers on the ground say that the response has been significantly hindered by the near-absence so far of the United States, historically the leader in any major outbreak.’
This is the predictable result of the Trump administration gutting public health and pandemic-preparedness infrastructure at home and abroad, including shuttering USAID and cutting themselves off from WHO’s global resources – all while escalating an unprecedented and dangerous leadership crisis at the Trump Health Department.
A leadership crisis that just got worse: Now, STAT reports that the acting head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases has stepped down, adding Jeffery Taubenberger’s “exit widens the leadership vacuum at the $47 billion agency, where 16 of the 27 institutes have acting directors. It also means that the agency’s second-largest institute, with a budget of $6.5 billion, is still without a permanent director, limiting its ability to plan for long-term projects or set initiatives for the wider research community.”
“Amid a deadly global Ebola threat and on the heels of a Hantavirus outbreak, The Trump-RFK Jr. HHS should be working non-stop to ensure any department that has anything to do with infectious disease has everything they need, including competent leaders in place,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project. “Instead, chaos agent Kennedy let U.S. Ebola spending plummet 99% since the last outbreak, left the CDC without a permanent head, and – after pushing out public health experts left and right – just oversaw yet another top NIH infectious disease official walk out the door in the middle of several public health crises. The worse the brain drain gets at the Trump HHS, the less capable they are to deal with major public health threats and keep Americans safe. The Trump-RFK Jr. HHS leadership crisis is very much a public health crisis with no end in sight.”
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