The U.S. government’s premier public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been notably absent from the global response to a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that has killed three passengers, according to multiple public health experts. The World Health Organization has taken the lead, issuing risk assessments and working with Spanish and Argentine authorities, while the CDC did not deploy disease investigators to the ship until late Friday, more than a week after the outbreak was first identified.
“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen that before.”
President Donald Trump told reporters Friday evening, “We seem to have things under very good control.” But the virus, which spreads through rodent excrement and is not easily transmissible between people, has not spiraled on the ship; experts say it is the CDC’s near-total absence that is alarming, not the outbreak itself.
The outbreak began early last month when a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a fever while the ship was traveling from Argentina toward Antarctica and islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. His wife, 69, and a German woman also died. Hantavirus was confirmed as the cause in one case on May 2, and the WHO declared an outbreak by Monday. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including roughly 17 who were still aboard as it sailed toward the Canary Islands.
CDC actions accelerated only late Friday, when health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to the Canary Islands to meet the Americans and a second team to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to establish a quarantine. The agency also issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them to watch for possible imported cases.
On Saturday, the agency held its first briefing, a telephone call for invited reporters, but under ground rules set by aides to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the officials could not be cited by name. They declined to say whether American passengers could freely leave the university medical facility once there. That morning, CDC acting director Jay Bhattacharya appeared on Fox News and told viewers, “My message to the American people is please don’t worry.” However, he gave incorrect details, stating that two passengers in their 80s had died after contracting the virus while bird-watching in Argentina. Argentine health officials consider it possible that the couple was infected during a bird-watching outing, but it has not been established.
Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, called the hantavirus outbreak “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, said the CDC’s handling “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now.” She criticized a short CDC statement Wednesday that called the risk to Americans “extremely low,” saying “not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”
Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, contrasted the current response with the agency’s actions during the COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in 2020. The CDC then sent personnel to the port in Japan, helped evacuate Americans, ran quarantines, shared genetic data, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” he said. “The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency’s work now is “delayed and subdued.”
The diminished role comes after 16 tumultuous months in which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, restricted CDC scientists’ contact with international counterparts, laid off thousands of staff, and embarked on building its own network of bilateral health agreements with individual countries. Kennedy has said he is working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”
But the hantavirus response has reinforced experts’ concerns that the CDC can no longer fulfill the role it once held. “You can’t possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” Gostin said.