Oh who needs disease control anyway – nobody but a bunch of wimps.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed it is sending a team to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius is expected to arrive on Sunday, and US passengers will be evacuated to an airbase in Nebraska. However, experts say the US is unprepared for such a disease threat.
The CDCs limited role in responding to the hantavirus outbreak is raising questions, including whether it now has a diminished role in responding to health scares. Most of the response has been led by the World Health Organization (WHO), of which the US is no longer a member.
Well now why would it have a diminished role? Sure, Trump gutted it, but what difference does that make?
It wasn’t until Thursday that the CDC activated its 24/7 emergency center in Atlanta to monitor the recent hantavirus outbreak and classified it at its lowest activation level.
It was busy doing more important things.
At the CDC’s first briefing, held on Saturday by telephone only for invited reporters, according to the Associated Press, officials pledged to be transparent in updating the public but said the media could not cite the speakers by name under guidelines issued by aides to the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Transparent but…not that kind of transparent.
Bhattacharya added that the “CDC has the world’s leading experts on hantavirus and is lending its technical expertise when coordinating with interagency partners, state health offices, and international authorities on response and repatriation planning”.
But experts and former government health officials say the response by the CDC has been feeble compared with how it dealt with similar outbreaks in the past.
“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University, told the AP. “I’ve never seen that before.”
Oh stop whining. We’re getting a new blue lining for the reflecting pool, what more do you want.
The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The CDC’s response is not typical for an agency that has in the past been at the forefront with the WHO in comparable infectious disease mysteries, both in developing ways to control them and communicate to the public what they should know and if they should be concerned.
“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now”, she said. The agency has laid off thousands of scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency’s ship sanitation program.
To pay for the ballroom.
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