News of a laboratory worker’s sudden death in Russia from an unidentified infection has public health experts questioning if the United States is ready to handle another pandemic.
President Donald Trump told reporters he has a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the plague scare and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “there is no evidence suggesting any immediate danger to the US public” in a post Tuesday on X. The mysterious circumstances around the death, which has prompted Russian officials to quarantine a reported 200 people, has nevertheless resurfaced concerns around Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nation’s public health preparedness in its aftermath.
“This administration has really dropped the ball on ‘ancient’ diseases that aren’t supposed to affect us anymore,” said Joseph Allen, a professor of exposure assessment science at Harvard University, citing the measles outbreaks around the country.
The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy sat empty for much of Trump’s first year back in office. The White House began restaffing it with a health official and biosecurity specialist this summer — hires that were heralded by the public health community but broadly seen as not enough.
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Former officials are not confident that the Trump administration has maintained necessary infrastructure to address another pandemic domestically.
Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Joe Biden, said that the national stockpile of masks, ventilators and other personal protective equipment was filled by the time he left his role but the country has “to constantly replenish it.”
As the Trump administration has laid off thousands of employees from the CDC, he is not sure that has been the case.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There are also some signs that the political backlash to COVID-19 restrictions, emboldened by current Republican leadership, could make it harder to manage a large-scale public health crisis.
For instance, Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, posted to his personal X account, “I’m not going to wear a mask again,” in response to a post on the death in Russia.
Allen said he does not buy into the assumption that people would not be willing to take COVID-19-like precautions if another pandemic transpired, though he remains concerned that the country isn’t prepared.
“Whatever hits next, and I don’t think it will be this, but we don’t have the systems in place to stop it,” he said.
The World Health Organization has stated that there is a low risk that the disease that killed the lab worker in Russia spreads globally. Initial reports from Russian media said that the woman might have died of pneumonic plague, according to reporting from The Associated Press. Russian authorities, though, have said that the woman died of pneumonia of “unknown origin” that was not connected to her work in the lab at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East.
Trump did lend some legitimacy to worries about a potential spread. He told reporters on Monday that the U.S. would help Russia and that pneumonic diseases were harder to treat.
“The microbes and the germs have gotten stronger disproportionately, so we’ll help them,” Trump said.
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