Asked this week why the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was missing during the first days of a hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz resorted to wholesale denials.
Oz, who runs the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, insisted in an Oval Office meeting: “It’s just not true.”
“Not true,” reiterated RFK Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. “We’ve had CDC teams on it day one.” He added: “As soon as (we) determined that the virus was out there, we issued an alert.”
In fact, day one would have been May 3, when the World Health Organization arrived to investigate. The next day, May 4, WHO declared an outbreak. The alert was reported globally. Any marginally competent government health organization would have seen it — and there were Americans onboard.
Delayed reaction, and death
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.
It was May 8 before the CDC finally issued a formal health alert.
The CDC was “not even a player,” Georgetown University public health expert Lawrence Gostin told the Associated Press.
The CDC was correct to assign a low threat priority to hantavirus transmission. But the CDC’s response is a bellwether, an early warning that the DOGE-decimated agency has been so weakened that it will not be able to handle broader outbreaks.
It “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center in Providence, R.I.
Nothing about the CDC’s reaction inspires confidence.
It reported flying 17 American passengers home. There were actually 18. There was no immediate explanation for why the CDC got the number wrong. Before they landed, a CDC official told reporters, “We are not quarantining anybody.” The next day, Americans were quarantined.
Long before the hantavirus started burning through this cruise ship, the CDC was recklessly making all cruises less safe.
Fewer and fewer inspectors
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.
The agency laid off “disease detectives” sent to dangerous outbreak sites, and then rushed to rehire them. Even before RFK Jr. took over, the Trump administration barred CDC scientists from talking to the World Health Organization.
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.
Further, a majority of those agreements are with smaller nations such as Mozambique, Malawi and the Dominican Republic. None has the scientific firepower of WHO members such as France’s Pasteur Institute, which played a key role in the AIDS epidemic, or Britain’s Medical Research Council, which has produced 32 Nobel Prize winners.
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.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, send an email to letters@sunsentinel.com.
