Trump Fired CDC Team Responsible For Investigating Cruise Ship Outbreaks

A year before an unprecedented hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, Trump gutted the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program.

The CDC spent years warning the world that cruise ships are floating outbreak incubators. Then, last year, the Trump administration gutted the very team designed to stop those outbreaks from spiraling out of control.

Now, as a deadly hantavirus outbreak unfolds aboard the Dutch vessel MV Hondius — leaving at least three passengers dead and multiple others infected — the timing of the Trump administration’s cuts to the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program is becoming impossible to ignore.