Amid growing concerns about hantavirus, Trump haunted by repeated misjudgments

Last Thursday, during a presidential field trip to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he had received a hantavirus briefing. He acknowledged that he had. Asked what he’d learned, the president said he and his team “hope” the matter is under control.

When a reporter quickly followed up, “Should Americans be concerned it’s going to spread?” Trump replied“I hope not.”

The exchange didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Nevertheless, a day later, during another White House Q&A, he added that “very good people” have looked into the threat and concluded that hantavirus transmission is difficult. “We hope that’s true,” Trump said.

For those with PTSD from the Republican’s failure to respond responsibly to the Covid-19 crisis six years ago, his unscripted comments were hardly reassuring. But more important than what Trump has said is what he has done. The Associated Press reported:

No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

While the United States has traditionally taken a leadership role in response to issues like these, the AP report added, “It has been health experts in other countries … who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.”

Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University, told the AP, “The CDC is not even a player. I’ve never seen that before.”

In hindsight, perhaps uprooting and destabilizing the nation’s public health infrastructure wasn’t such a good idea.

Indeed, there is no real mystery here. As Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University’s School of Public Health, explained in a piece for MS NOW:

Scientific expertise in virology, epidemiology, diagnostics, environmental sampling and basic medicine are critical to the response. Unfortunately, funding for our key scientific agencies has been slashed and thousands of scientists have been fired by Trump and his health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Other weaknesses in our federal agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention having no permanent director, and the interim head, Jay Bhattacharya, being busy running the National Institutes of Health. Media reports citing CDC employees say the agency is “flying blind” and work has “slowed to a crawl.” Many NIH and National Science Foundation grants that have been cut focused on topics of infectious disease, vaccinology and pandemic preparedness, reducing our knowledge and readiness for the next pandemic.

Trump’s decision to abandon the World Health Organization hasn’t exactly helpedeither.

A related report from The New York Times added, “To some public health experts, the alarming thing about this situation is not the hantavirus, which they note spreads among people rarely, and only with close contact over a period of time rather than casual interactions. It is that the administration’s sluggish response and lack of communication suggest the United States is ill prepared for a larger health crisis, such as another pandemic.”

As the week got underway, a reporter asked the president, “What do you say to infectious disease experts who are worried the country isn’t prepared to deal with something like hantavirus because of all the HHS funding and staffing cuts?” Trump, predictably unaware of events unfolding around himpassed the question onto Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which has nothing to do with infectious diseases or federal responses to public health threats.

For his part, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote to Kennedy and Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the weekend, demanding information on the number of full-time CDC staff working on the hantavirus response, current staffing at the Port Health Stations and Vessel Sanitation Program, the administration’s communication channels with the World Health Organization, the plan to protect the American public including any traveler screening protocols, and the coordination between CDC and state and local health departments receiving Americans returning from the ship.

In a press statement, the New York Democrat added that it was just a year ago when the Department of Health and Human Services fired every full-time employee at the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, and three of the CDC’s 20 Port Health Stations have no staff at allhalf have no officer in charge, and the remainder rely on temporary workers.

“Public health under this administration is a sinking ship, and Trump keeps firing the crew,” Schumer concluded. “The very CDC inspectors and port health workers we need to track this virus, the people whose entire job is to keep deadly diseases off cruise ships and out of our country, Donald Trump fired them. This White House will tell you the risk to Americans is low. How do they know? They have made it impossible to find out. That is not reassurance. That is incompetence.”

Kennedy and Rubio have not yet responded to the Democratic leader’s request for information. Watch this space.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”