New York — There is no rapid dispatch of disease investigators. There is no televised press conference to inform the public. There are no timely health alerts for doctors.
In the middle of a Hanta virus outbreak Which includes Americans and It makes headlines around the worldUncharacteristically, the US government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was Missing in actionAccording to a number of experts.
As for President Donald Trump, “things seem to be under very good control,” he told reporters Friday evening.
To the experts, the situation The disease did not spike on a cruise ship because, unlike COVID-19, measles or influenza, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have primarily dealt with the outbreak in the past week.
“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen that before.”
CDC action did not accelerate until late Friday.
Health officials confirmed that a team was being sent to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the ship is expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet with the Americans on board. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to the University of Nebraska Quarantine Center for evaluation and monitoring. Also, the CDC issued First health alert to American doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.
At the first briefing, held Saturday by phone only for invited reporters, officials pledged transparency in updating the public, but said the media could not mention speakers by name under rules set by aides to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They did not directly answer a question about whether American passengers could leave the university’s medical facility when they wanted.
Some experts said the CDC’s diminished role in this outbreak is an indication that the agency is no longer the international health force or domestic health protector it once was.
Dr. Jane Marrazzo, CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said the Hantavirus outbreak is a “sentinel event” that speaks to “how prepared the country is to confront the disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say we’re not prepared.”
Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man fell ill with a fever on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. Many more people fell ill, including the man’s wife and a German woman, both of whom died.
It was hantavirus It was identified for the first time As the cause of illness in one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on board the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.
For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collaborated with the World Health Organization in such situations. The CDC has been the mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any mystery of the outbreak, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what the public should know and how they should be concerned.
Actions like these were a big reason why the CDC gained a reputation as the world’s leading public health agency.
But this time, the World Health Organization was at the center stage. It carried out a risk assessment that told people the outbreak did not pose a pandemic threat.
“I don’t think this poses a significant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Brown University Epidemiology Center. The way this situation has developed “just shows how empty and inane the CDC is right now,” she said.
The current situation comes after 16 turbulent months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the World Health Organization CDC scientists restricted From speaking to international counterparts on occasion, it embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through individual agreements with individual countries.
The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency’s ship sterilization program.
While this was going on, Kennedy He said it was working “To restore CDC’s focus on infectious diseases, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”
The CDC hasn’t been completely silent about Hantavirus.
On Wednesday, the agency issued a short statement saying the risks to the American public were “very low” and called the US government a “world leader in global health security.”
“Not only was it unhelpful, it actually causes harm because the basic principle of public health communication is humility,” Nuzzo said.
Acting Director of the CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Posted a message On social media, the agency was offering its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials said this week they learned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person who had no symptoms and is not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC is sharing technical information.
The CDC is also “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all U.S. passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.
But federal health officials were mostly hawkish, declining requests for interviews. The first on-camera appearance by a CDC official came on Saturday morning, when Bhattacharyya appeared on a Fox News show and said: “My message to the American people is please don’t worry.” But he got some details wrong, and overestimated what was known about the outbreak.
He incorrectly said that two passengers in their 80s died after contracting the virus while birdwatching in Argentina. The travelers were a 70-year-old Dutch man and his 69-year-old wife, and while Argentine health officials believe they likely became infected during a birdwatching outing, Not established.
In interviews this week, some experts drew a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the scene of one of the first coronavirus outbreaks outside China.
The CDC sent personnel to the port and helped evacuate American passengers. Quarantine runShared genetic data on the virus, coordinated by the World Health Organization and Japan, held public briefings and quickly published reports “that became the global reference data on coronavirus transmission on cruise ships,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess They were criticized, It did not stop the outbreak or halt the spread of COVID-19 around the world. But some experts say it wasn’t for the CDC’s lack of trying.
“The CDC has been on top of it, very clear, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency’s work is now lagging and subservient.
Instead of working with nearly every country in the world through the World Health Organization, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual countries to share information, support public health, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” There are currently approximately 30 agreements.
But that’s not enough, Justin said. “You cannot cover up a global health crisis by making individual deals with countries here and there,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington, and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
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