It has only been five years, and more than 1.2 million American deaths, since we were all locked inside during a pandemic that President Donald Trump repeatedly said would simply “go away.”
Now Trump’s Health and Human Services Department, with help from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, is cutting COVID-19-related funding for state and local public health departments by at least $11.4 billion, they announced Wednesday in a statement.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the HHS said in a statement. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again."
Dr. Céline Gounder, editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told CBS News, “This ... is money that had been going to state, local, territorial, tribal health departments across the country, and as we know, as was the case with a lot of COVID funding, it was not just supporting COVID-related programs, but many other things.”
Those “other things” encompass a range of efforts, including wastewater detection systems that monitor emerging diseases in regions like Texas—which has had $877 million in grants canceled by Kennedy and DOGE. Kennedy’s handling of the state’s largest outbreak of the measles in 30 years, has been justifiably criticized.
In a statement to NBC News, Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment said that Kennedy and the HHS’s wholesale budget cut, “threatens Colorado’s ability to track COVID-19 trends and other emerging diseases, modernize disease data systems, respond to outbreaks, and provide critical immunization access, outreach, and education—leaving communities more vulnerable to future public health crises.”
California Department of Public Health Director and State Public Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan elaborated to CBS on how important these funds are to public health.
"This funding supports the public health work and data systems improved during the pandemic that helped California fill gaps in its existing public health infrastructure, including ongoing response to COVID-19 disease and other respiratory and vaccine-preventable diseases that require similar resources.”
Additional cuts include a $577 million program dedicated to identifying and developing antiviral drugs for SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, along with six other types of viruses with pandemic potential.
Jason McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of Texas, Austin, told Nature that the moves are “clearly shortsighted. To cancel the entire grant because a small portion involved SARS-CoV-2 is going to be dangerous for future pandemic preparedness.”
Kennedy’s position atop our country’s public health department is already dangerous to our country’s well-being. His anti-vaccine stances and raw milk enthusiasm are unscientific and are already jeopardizing important scientific research in fields like cancer treatment and prevention.
The billions in cuts also come with thousands of lost jobs, as Trump, Kennedy, and DOGE are demanding huge reductions in our public health system’s workforce and capacity. This includes firing almost 25% of its full-time workforce and cutting regional offices in half.
Five years ago, almost to the day, Trump had claimed that COVID would just “go away” only six or seven times. But as The Washington Post showed:
There are an estimated 20 million Americans suffering from a range of long COVID symptoms. Researchers have estimated that losses to the workforce from long COVID costs the global economy around $1 trillion per year. These cuts will damage the important research being done in this field, as there is still much we don’t know.
But one thing we do know is that COVID has never simply “gone away.”
Campaign Action
