As Trump vents about COVID, experts worry his moves could worsen next threat

In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday was told to lay off an estimated 10% of its staff, including nearly an entire class of “disease detectives” — the infectious-disease experts charged with helping spot the next epidemic.

In West Texas, local officials warned about the spreading risk of measles, saying that an outbreak of the vaccine-preventable disease had doubled to 48 cases since earlier this week.

And in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order focused on coronavirus vaccination mandates in schools and universities.

“President Trump is fulfilling his campaign promise: ‘I will not allow schools to impose COVID vaccine mandates,’” a White House fact sheet read. Even some GOP officials acknowledged that the order addresses an issue that is effectively moot: Almost all colleges and universities stopped requiring covid-19 vaccination after the public health emergency ended in May 2023, according to the American College Health Association.

Five years after a public health crisis rattled Trump’s first White House, his second appears to be responding by rolling back the nation’s disease-spotting safety net — even as new threats lurk. Some of the emerging policies have been driven by backlash to the covid-19 response, after Trump made clear his disdain for the nation’s public health infrastructure. He and allies have said the U.S. approach to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates and school shutdowns, was heavy-handed, a position that some Democrats now share too. But Trump’s latest moves may be cutting into the country’s fundamental ability to identify health threats and head them off, experts said.

Friday’s developments offered a stark contrast.

The new administration, propelled by Elon Musk, is shredding federal workers and agencies across government — using a “wood chipper,” not a scalpel, Musk has said — and offering red meat to supporters who remain angry about the Biden administration’s actions, including its pandemic-era vaccine policies. The executive order that Trump signed Friday would bar federal funds for educational agencies, schools and universities that require students to receive covid-19 vaccinations.

“People wanted that very badly,” Trump said, as he signed an order that some physicians have dismissed as “theater” because it targets abandoned policies.

The same day, Brooke Rollins, the new secretary of agriculture, told reporters that her first briefing after being confirmed Thursday was on combating the risk of avian flu, which has spread through cattle herds and into humans, sometimes undetected. Global health leaders have warned about a new outbreak of Ebola virus in Uganda and other emerging outbreaks overseas.

The split-screen image of rising threats and diminished support for the government’s ability to respond has alarmed many public health experts.

“We’re heading in the wrong direction,” said Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a former CDC staffer. She pointed to developments that worried her across America, such as Louisiana health officials announcing on Thursday that they would no longer support “mass vaccination” programs such as flu clinics, or Trump appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to run the nation’s health agencies.

Rivers said that retreats from global disease-preventing efforts, such as Trump’s move last month to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization, hamper the ability to coordinate with other countries as diseases spread.

“It all goes hand in hand, culminating in the degradation of our public health capabilities,” she said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of federal workers were fired on Friday, with dozens of members of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) initially among them. The disease-detective program, which annually hires a new class for two-year fellowships, plucks experts who are deployed across the country to investigate outbreaks and help manage the response.

Many of them were set to be gone as the Trump administration purges new hires across government, a staggering development for public health leaders who say it harms America by weakening both its present and future emergency-response capabilities.

“You have to understand that the EIS are not only the surge capacity for public health outbreaks but also are the essential core of every state health department’s future leadership,” said Farzad Mostashari, a former EIS officer, who posted a list on social media that touted some of the disease detectives’ past work.

After EIS officers were told they were let go on Friday, Trump officials sent a revised, smaller termination list to CDC that did not include the EIS officers, said two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive personnel matters.

Hundreds of other workers were also targeted on Friday at CDC, though many who were expecting to be fired had yet to receive a termination notice on Saturday. The agency has been a frequent target of Trump officials, who have repeatedly criticized the agency and other parts of the federal health bureaucracy as overly slow and academic. That criticism was shared in part by Biden-era leaders, who have made calls to carefully revamp the agency but not indiscriminately gut it.

“The CDC should be treated with a scalpel, not an axe,” Mandy Cohen, who led the agency under Biden, wrote in an op-ed last month.

The new administration also has stressed a new focus: combating chronic diseases, not infectious ones. Kennedy, newly sworn in as Trump’s top heath official, has vowed to prioritize reducing obesity, diabetes, cardiac illnesses and other conditions that afflict Americans at higher rates than abroad and are largely responsible for the nation’s lagging life expectancy.

Leaders “must redirect our national focus, in the public and private sectors, toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease,” according to an executive order issued by Trump on Thursday that established a commission of Cabinet secretaries to devise a plan to “Make America Healthy Again” within the next three months.

Calley Means, an outside adviser to Kennedy, trumpeted the new executive order as an overdue effort to examine causes of illness and premature death, including factors such as environmental toxins and insufficient housing.

“Bobby and President Trump are going to be convening almost every sector of government,” Means said on “Fox & Friends” on Saturday. “We’re getting sick from an interconnected set of factors. We’ve lost our way.”

Kennedy, who has denied being anti-vaccine, has also called for changes to federal recommendations on vaccines and signaled other doubts. Asked whether Americans should continue to receive the polio vaccine — which has been administered for 70 years and credited with eliminating the risk of the disease in the United States — Kennedy told the Senate in a written response last month that “Americans should make their own decisions about their health.”

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• Laura Meckler contributed.