Experts wonder ‘Where is the CDC?’ as a hantavirus outbreak unfolds on a cruise ship

NEW YORK – No rapid dispatch of disease investigators. No press conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

Amid a bizarre hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s main public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has disappeared, according to a number of experts.

“We seem to have things under very good control,” President Donald Trump told reporters Friday evening.

But experts say the situation has not escalated because, unlike COVID-19, measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. Experts from other countries, not the United States, have primarily dealt with the outbreak over the past week.

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

The CDC’s diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator that the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of national health that it once was, some experts said.

PHOTOS: Experts Ask: ‘Where is the CDC?’ » as hantavirus outbreak spreads on cruise ship

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that shows “how prepared the country is for a disease threat. And right now, I’m really sorry to say we’re not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, executive director of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

How the epidemic unfolded

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man contracted a febrile illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some South Atlantic islands. He died less than a week later. Other people fell ill, including the man’s wife and a German woman, both of whom died.

Hantavirus was first identified as the cause of illness in one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization took action and called it an epidemic on Monday. About two dozen Americans were aboard the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

It’s the WHO that takes center stage

For decades, the CDC has partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC has acted as a pillar of any international investigation, providing personnel and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mysteries, develop ways to control it, and communicate to the public what they need to know and how they should be concerned.

Such actions are a large part of why the CDC has earned a reputation as the world’s premier public health agency.

But this time, it’s the WHO that takes center stage. The risk assessment showed people that the outbreak did not pose a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. But the way this situation played out “shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.

Uproar until Trump

The current situation comes after a tumultuous 16 months in which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, at times blocked CDC scientists from speaking to their international counterparts and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through individual agreements with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency’s ship sanitation program.

As this unfolded, Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious diseases, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

Waiting for news from the CDC

The CDC has not remained completely silent on hantavirus.

The agency issued a brief statement Wednesday saying the risk to the American public is “extremely low” and calling the U.S. government a “world leader in global health security.”

Nuzzo said, “Not only was this not helpful, it actually caused harm, because one of the fundamental principles of public health communications is humility. »

Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya posted a message on social media saying the agency was using its expertise to coordinate with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials said this week they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who jumped ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC was sharing technical information.

The CDC is also “monitoring health status and preparing medical assistance for all U.S. cruise passengers,” Bhattacharya wrote.

But federal health officials have mostly exercised discretion and declined interview requests. Some details were revealed not through public statements but through revelations from anonymous sources, including Friday’s announcement that the CDC was sending a team to Spain’s Canary Islands to meet with the Americans on board.

Health officials released an updated statement Friday evening, confirming the deployment of a team to the Canary Islands. They also said a second team would travel to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate the ship’s American passengers to a quarantine center.

COVID-19 Comparison

In interviews this week, some experts drew a comparison to a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the scene of one of the first major COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.

The CDC sent staff to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, organized quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and quickly released reports “that became the global gold standard on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director.

Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess have been criticized, and they have not stopped the outbreak or stopped the spread of COVID-19 across the world. But some experts say it’s not for lack of effort by the CDC.

“The CDC was on top, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain the situation,” Gostin said, as the agency’s work is now delayed and subdued.

Instead of working with almost every country in the world through the WHO, the Trump administration has entered into bilateral health agreements with individual countries for information sharing, public health support and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Around thirty agreements are currently in force.

That’s not enough, Gostin said. “You cannot cover up a global health crisis by making individual agreements with countries here and there,” he said.