The Data is Disappearing, Food and Drug Testing is Shut Down, and Outbreaks are Expanding

The United States public health is fumbling forward blindly, expect increases in infectious disease, food-borne illness, STIs, and an overwhelmed medical system ill-equipped to handle the surge

I vividly remember Donald Trump in his first term saying something along the lines of: “if we don’t test for COVID there won’t be COVID cases.”

What I heard as a multi-decade career scientist was: “if you don’t stare directly at the sun, it will disappear”. It was absurd.

Most of us have higher logical reasoning capacities than your average ostrich, sticking their head in the sand. We all know that COVID-19 cases would not have ‘gone away.’ Instead, the viral pandemic would have become deadlier. Without understanding which variants were next and when case waves were starting we could not have updated vaccines, taken spread reduction measures, or prepared hospital staff for incoming waves of sick people.

Without understanding ‘what was killing people’ scientists and physicians would not have had the research support to produce therapeutics and vaccines that could treat, slow, and stop disease spread.

When Trump suggested we stopped testing for COVID-19 there were still guardrails in place. Smart people who had dedicated their lives to public health and worked non-stop during the pandemic response persisted, ignoring the absurd idea to not test for a virus that was killing people so fast that morgues were overwhelmed and refrigerator trucks sat outside of hospitals for weeks at a time.

The first director of the CDC’s injury center was quoted in a recent news report:

"There's nothing partisan about injuries," says Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the first director of the CDC's injury center, which was established in the early '90s.

"These are our kids who are being shot, our kids who are drowning, our kids who are being abused and neglected," he says.

Today, the guardrails and many of the people that preserved public health are gone. Some quit out of sheer exhaustion, not just from the pandemic itself, but continuous harassment of scientists and medical professionals. Others have recently been fired by a team of teens and twenty-year-olds who couldn’t pass a basic college biology course test if given one on the spot.

Agencies within the HHS tasked with protecting the health and safety of Americans, especially the CDC and FDA have suffered significant reductions in operations. In some cases entire branches of these agencies have been eliminated. United States public health is fumbling forward blindly into the unknown.

Accidents and Food and Drug Safety: No Testing, No Tracking, No Guardrails

As of this writing, it appears that the entire injury prevention team at the CDC has been fired. This team tracked motor vehicle crashes, child maltreatment, rape prevention and education, drowning, traumatic brain injury, adverse drug events, firearm injuries and death, drownings, poisoning, dog bites, falls in the elderly, among other accidents.

If no one is tracking adverse drug events through the CDC, and the FDA’s testing branch has been limited that they are unable to do regular routine inspections and testing, we are inviting disaster.

Getting sick and dying from a E. coli coated batch of lettuce, a botulism-heavy batch of local honey, or a bad batch of Tylenol and not knowing the source due to lack of testing means that public health officials won’t be able to stop it. State health departments will have to organize collaborative efforts to track down issues, something they are underfunded and not equipped to do without the assistance of the CDC.

The trends we won’t know about and the data we won’t collect will make it impossible to prepare for and eliminate serious threats to public health.

To paraphrase a comment from a recent video I posted: “we won’t know if something is killing us until the bodies start piling up”.

This is happening very fast.

As I was compiling this article the FDA suspended milk and other dairy product quality testing operations. This is due to workforce cuts. Cuts like this mean that food borne illnesses and potentially deaths will increase, and soon.

Additionally, some people fail to understand that the FDA also safe-guards our food safety as well as the safety of many over the counter products. For example, the FDA forced the recall of many hand sanitizers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that had dangerous unlisted cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene. It is murky at best if these operations will continue. This means that suppliers can play it loose with dangerous chemicals that may end up in your baby wipes or child’s hand sanitizer.

Lack of Testing Will Lead to Increases in Disease Spread

Last week, the Florida Department of Public Health issued this warning (April 11th, 2025) urging all patients to seek testing after several years of potential Hepatitis C exposure at: Lily J. Voepel, MD, Interventional Pain Management, located at 4015 N Harbor City Blvd., Melbourne, FL. Patients were possibly exposed the Hepatitis C between June 2023 and March 2025 as a result of unsafe infection control practices. But, it was not Florida Department of Public Health that found the source of this Hepatitis C outbreak, it was the CDC.

But every scientist at the CDC lab who identified the source of the Florida Hepatitis C outbreak has been fired. All news reports indicate that the lab that linked the sudden rise in cases to this one pain management clinic remains shuttered. The CDC team is gone. There is no other lab that is equipped to perform this kind of testing and tracing in the United States.

Hepatitis C which may enter the blood transfusion supply (along with HIV and Hepatitis B) is now a treatable disease and not as much of a death sentence as it once was. However, it can cause years of liver damage before it is detected and the treatment is expensive and may not be fully covered by insurance. It is not fully covered by Medicaid.

Syphilis cases are also on the rise, increasing 80% between 2018 and 2022 and congenital syphilis which can cause life-long health issues for children was 10-times higher in 2022 than 2012. But you’ll see that in this Johns Hopkins report reviewing rising syphilis cases, all links to the CDC data to support these numbers only return blank pages showing 'Page Not Found’ errors.

If you search STI statistics you can find a page with the header: “CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders.”

I am extremely familiar with CDC webpages, data, and organization of the data so I searched to see if I could find the raw data on syphilis cases anywhere. It took me 20 minutes of searching to eventually find that data that shows that both total and congenital syphilis cases are still rising in the United States. The pace of the increase slowed from 2022 to 2023, but it was still increasing.

With the reduction in testing and monitoring, we are likely to not fully capture any significant changes in STI spread that may significantly impact health.

How Many Epidemics or Pandemics Can We Expect With These Cuts?

Currently, we are walking blind into a potential bird flu (H5N1) pandemic. People working on bird flu at both the FDA and USDA were fired. The last reports on this I have been able to find have been about attempts to find and re-hire some of these people. If that has been achieved, if operations are normal, we do not know. Scientists within these agencies are speaking rarely and on condition of anonymity.

I personally can quote one of the many colleagues from my years in research who now works at the NIH. They told me that internally “It’s a shit-show, no one knows what is really going on”. I imagine it is the same inside of the FDA and USDA, and the CDC as we know is no longer testing for many diseases.

With lack of testing, monitoring, treatment, and reduction of disease spread both here in the United States and a withdraw of funding for programs abroad, disease resurgence is eminent. From food-borne illness, to cancer, to viral infection, the safety net is gone.

Many state public health departments may still be doing good work, but the point of the CDC, FDA, and USDA (and many other HHS departments) was to have one cohesive set of data, testing, and regulations across the United States and it’s territories. No other agencies or groups in the United States was equipped to manage this.

Here are just a few examples of what is likely to happen if these agencies are not rapidly back in operation:

• Outbreaks of blood borne pathogens like HIV, Hepatitis B and C can reduce the supply of available blood for transfusion and lack of detection and testing can increase rates of transfusion-based transmission.

• Listeria outbreaks in dairy products can be deadly in children and older adults, who is monitoring the milk on our shelves for safety now?

• The outbreak of MPOX that was controlled in 2022 by CDC teams that no longer exist, may soon re-occur. A more easily spread and deadly Clade 1b MPOX that is spreading in several African countries has already been detected in Europe. There is evidence that the vaccine given for MPOX in 2022 (JYNNEOS) has already worn off and will not be protective if clade 1b arrives in the United States.

The current state of HHS departments is that they are simply not equipped with enough people or enough financial backing to test for diseases, assist in identifying outbreak sources, or help in controlling disease spread.

In summary, it’s not just one epidemic or pandemic we are flirting with, it’s all of them. The guardrails that have prevented high rates of disease spread are gone.