A sign outside Seminole Hospital District in Texas offers measles testing in February. Julio Cortez/AP
This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared. Hundreds of people in the US continue to die of Covid each week, while millions more suffer complications from Long Covid. We’re experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. There are multiple outbreaks of measles, the most serious occurring in an undervaccinated West Texas community. Then there’s the threat of bird flu, which has spread through dairy and poultry farms, sickening dozens of people and killing one so far.
At the same time, the second Trump administration has been actively reshaping and even dismantling the country’s public health infrastructure. Hundreds of employees across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration have been handed termination notices. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s new secretary of health and human services, still questions the use of vaccines, specifically the MMR vaccine to prevent measles.
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and developing public health emergencies.
Rivera says the US is still not testing enough people to determine whether these diseases and others are spreading. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making things even more difficult by withholding regular public health data that infectious disease experts routinely rely on to assess whether a larger health emergency is emerging. “Without good data, we can’t make good informed choices,” she says. “And it is conceivable that [a pandemic] can be happening and brewing right underneath our nose and us not pick it up.”
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