Hantavirus humiliates RFK Jr.
News reports went viral today of Kennedy having gutted the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, firing every full-time cruise ship sanitation inspector, before the deadly outbreak on a cruise ship.
Three people on a cruise out of Southern Argentina last month have died from a deadly hantavirus outbreak onboard, and five more infections and possible infections are being traced throughout more than a dozen countries. A British man is in intensive care in South Africa with the respiratory disease, and three people are reporting symptoms in Europe, according to the World Health Organization (which Trump pulled us out of in January, incidentally). The variant of the virus that jumped onto this cruise, called the Andes variant, can be contracted from rat urine or droppings and spread from human to human. Argentine officials suspect that a Dutch couple, two of the three people who died on the cruise, contracted the virus during a bird-watching excursion at an Argentine landfill and brought it aboard the ship.
People are freaking out about a potential hantavirus pandemic, understandably, because we’re all still traumatized by the Covid pandemic and how it also started as just a few deadly cases very far away. And there were American passengers on the cruise, at least six of whom have returned their to their home states by now. But the hantavirus is very unlikely to become a pandemic, infectious disease experts say, because it’s difficult for it to transmit between people unless you’ve been in close quarters with an infected person for a long period of time. “There’s really no risk to anyone who is not on that ship,” Dr. Bryce Warner, an expert on the virus, told the New York Times.
Still, the hantapanic has yielded something productive, which is a renewed scrutiny on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (and DOGE’s) reckless mass firings across U.S. federal health agencies—including, specifically, the guys who were hired to inspect cruise ships for health and sanitation and investigate outbreaks. CBS News reports that Kennedy fired all of the full-time employees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vessel Sanitation Program as part of its sweeping, indiscriminate layoffs when Trump took office. Notably, these guys’ salaries were paid by the cruise companies, not by taxpayers, so getting rid of them saved the federal government zero dollars while enabling massive ships full of vacationers to be floating petri dishes of infectious disease. Per the story:
The steep cuts to the program’s inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team’s staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.
The epidemiologist tasked with leading the agency’s outbreak response on cruise ships was included in the layoffs, multiple CDC officials said.
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At least a dozen outbreaks have been documented so far this year on cruise ships, mostly from norovirus. Some of those outbreaks have made headlines for sickening dozens or even hundreds of people. There were 18 total outbreaks listed for all of last year.
Agency staff were in the middle of responding to two outbreaks when they were let go, an official said.
Keep in mind that if Bari Weiss’ CBS News, which now skews quite friendly toward the Trump Administration, is reporting and publishing a piece this damning, it’s an extremely bad look for Trump and Kennedy. And many of the biggest viral news and left-leaning influencer accounts on X and Instagram, including the former Kamala Harris campaign’s Headquarters, jumped on the story today to make sure everybody is clear about what terrifyingly stupid leadership looks like.
RFK Jr. knows he shouldn’t have fired those people. He had said a year ago after DOGE randomly took a chainsaw to the CDC that "20% of those thousands of firings had likely been “mistakes” and that he was going to try and hire some of them back. "Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut. We're reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the — at DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we're going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we'll make mistakes," Kennedy told reporters in April 2025. He then rescinded hundreds of CDC termination notices, which made him look incompetent in the first place, and also apparently missed quite a few important ones.
With that said, RFK Jr. has also made it clear that he is a eugenicist who wants people dead. He has replaced experienced doctors and health officials with anti-vax quacks, leading to a massive surge in child measles cases across the U.S. (including a new case in Manhattan). Babies are bleeding to death from vitamin K deficiency because MAHA moms are rejecting the vitamin shot their infants are supposed to get at birth. The FDA blocked the publication of new research confirming that the Covid and shingles vaccines are safe and flipped the food pyramid upside down, because truth and facts and science tend to upset Trump’s base. Meanwhile, Kennedy himself is out here slicing off raccoon penises, decapitating whales, and “rescuing” a bird at the airport that looks like it’s about to find itself still alive inside the secretary’s mouth, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence during multinational outbreaks.
If there’s three things to know about MAGA voters, one is that they lack basic empathy and relish in seeing bad things happen to people who disagree with them. The second is that they are driven by fear—of immigrants, trans people, cities, women, public transportation, the unknown. And the third is that they fucking love cruises. Republicans love to get on a big eyesore of a boat and then just be on that boat, passing by other countries from a distance with a piña colada in hand and never having to get out and interact with anyone in those countries. It’s baked into the party platform. So Trump voters can’t love seeing the news that his administration fired all the guys who were supposed to keep them from dying of rat-borne disease outbreaks on vacation.