For a president who upholds “Make America Healthy Again” as a load-bearing narrative pillar, Donald Trump has gone to remarkable lengths to make the US a breeding ground for a widening range of viruses, bacterium, and parasites — and no, we’re not talking about his cabinet.
Early into his second tenure as commander-in-chief, Trump and his cronies set to rapidly dismantling offices doing critical work on public health. His appointments were a one-two punch on longstanding institutions safeguarding the US from the ravages of disease: Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the government’s capacity to identify and track public health problems, while Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services limited what the government was willing to do about them.
Case in point: the Centre for Disease Control has lost nearly a quarter of its workforce since January 2025, while those who remain have watched in horror as the CDC’s acting director cut the number of universally recommended childhood vaccines from 17 down to 11.
Examples of those kinds of policy faceplants abound, and the cumulative consequences will surely be felt for decades to come. And nowhere are the consequences of the Trump administration’s war on public health more obvious than in the diseases we’d previously had under control, but which are now surging back after a year and a half of MAHA.
