When hantavirus killed three passengers aboard a cruise ship carrying roughly two dozen Americans, the agency built to be the world's first responder was, in the words of Georgetown's Lawrence Gostin, "not even a player" — a judgment Gostin said he had never been able to apply to the CDC before. STAT News reported Friday that the agency issued no health alert to U.S. doctors until late in the week, held no public briefing, and dispatched no investigators until days into the outbreak.
The contrast with the Diamond Princess COVID response in early 2020 is instructive. Former CDC Director Tom Frieden told STAT the agency then sent personnel to Japan, ran quarantines, shared genomic data, coordinated with WHO, and published reports that "became the world's reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission." The agency that did those things has shed thousands of scientists under the current administration, including staff from its ship sanitation program.
The CDC's diminished capacity is not incidental — it is the direct result of appropriations choices and executive dismantlement. Said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University's Pandemic Center: "This just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now."