America dismantles disease preparedness infrastructure whilst claiming to protect public health
The Trump administration uses COVID resentment to systematically dismantle institutions crucial for future pandemic response
The email arrived without warning. "This serves as formal notice of your immediate termination," it read. Within hours, all 17 members of America's most important vaccine advisory committee had been fired. Decades of expertise in infectious diseases, paediatrics, and immunology—gone with a single directive from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That June purge was just the beginning.
In the months since, the Trump administration has unleashed an unprecedented assault on America's disease preparedness infrastructure. More than $2 billion in pandemic research funding has been axed. Hundreds of grants targeting future viral threats have been terminated mid-study. Critical vaccine development programmes have been cancelled outright.
Yet every cut comes wrapped in the language of public health protection. Kennedy claims he's "restoring trust" in vaccines whilst redirecting resources toward "safer" alternatives. Officials frame each cancellation as correcting past failures rather than eliminating future capabilities.
This isn't policy confusion—it's strategic genius. The administration has weaponised COVID resentment, transforming public frustration with pandemic policies into a battering ram against institutions that would normally be untouchable. They're not just cutting budgets; they're systematically dismantling the architecture of American pandemic response.
When the next disease outbreak arrives—not if, but when—America will meet it virtually disarmed.
The anatomy of institutional destruction
The scale suggests a coordinated war plan, not random budget cuts. Start with the June massacre of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the independent scientists who evaluate vaccine safety and recommend which vaccines Americans should receive. Kennedy claimed "conflicts of interest" but offered no evidence. The real motive was simpler: these experts had endorsed COVID vaccines.
Next came the research obliteration. The National Institutes of Health terminated 694 grants worth $1.81 billion, targeting studies on COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, health disparities, and vaccine hesitancy. The pattern was unmistakable: anything connected to politically sensitive health topics got the axe.
Then the final blow: Kennedy cancelled 22 mRNA vaccine contracts worth nearly $500 million through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. This included a $766 million programme developing bird flu vaccines—the very technology that could save millions if H5N1 jumps to humans.
Rick Bright, who ran BARDA during Trump's first presidency, calls it "unprecedented." The mRNA cuts alone, he warns, "will have severe consequences, measured in lost lives, when a rapid vaccine response is needed."
But here's what makes this truly insidious: each cut creates cascading damage. When BARDA cancels contracts, pharmaceutical companies lose faith in government partnerships. When NIH terminates grants mid-study, researchers abandon careers or flee to other countries. When expert committees get replaced with political appointees, the scientific credibility that underpins public trust evaporates.
The dominos are falling exactly as designed.
COVID resentment as the perfect weapon
The strategic breakthrough lies in understanding how perfectly COVID grievances serve as political cover for much broader institutional attacks. Americans may support disease preparedness in theory, but millions remain furious about vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and years of upended lives.
Kennedy has turned this anger into a skeleton key, unlocking attacks on any institution or technology associated with pandemic response. Don't like mRNA vaccines? Blame them for COVID policy failures. Want to gut expert advisory committees? Claim they were compromised during the pandemic. Need to cancel research grants? Target studies on politically toxic topics like vaccine hesitancy.
The framing is brilliant because it sidesteps defending institutional destruction on its merits. Instead of arguing that America should have weaker pandemic preparedness, Kennedy positions every cut as correcting specific COVID-era mistakes whilst supposedly supporting public health.
Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University's Pandemic Center sees the trap: "People trust COVID vaccines less, which makes it easy for vaccine opponents to use attacks on those vaccines as purchase for broader assaults."
It's political aikido—using the opponent's momentum against them. Public health institutions spent years building authority through expertise and evidence. But authority built on trust can be demolished with suspicion. And COVID provided ample material for suspicion.
The capabilities we're losing forever
What makes this strategy so dangerous is how it destroys capabilities that can't be quickly rebuilt. Consider mRNA technology, now being systematically defunded despite representing humanity's fastest response to new viral threats.
During COVID, mRNA vaccines reached the public in under a year—a previously impossible timeline that saved millions of lives. Traditional vaccine development takes five to ten years. In a fast-moving pandemic, that difference determines whether you're protecting people or counting bodies.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota's Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, calls Kennedy's mRNA cuts "the most dangerous public health judgment I've seen in 50 years." He's not being hyperbolic. In pandemic response, he explains, "speed is the name of the game."
The fired advisory committee members possessed something equally irreplaceable: institutional memory. They understood the complex trade-offs in vaccine recommendations, maintained relationships with state health officials, and could coordinate rapid responses during outbreaks. Political appointees, however credentialed, lack these networks built over decades.
The cancelled research grants eliminated studies on universal flu vaccines, long COVID treatments, and preparations for emerging diseases. These aren't abstract academic exercises—they're insurance policies against the next viral threat.
Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine warns that the message to pharmaceutical companies is clear: "They can no longer rely on the U.S. government for mRNA vaccine work." That signal is already driving investment overseas, accelerating America's slide from global leader to pandemic also-ran.
Institutional capture disguised as reform
The deeper game here isn't temporary policy change—it's permanent institutional transformation. By replacing expert committees, redirecting research priorities, and cancelling development programmes, the administration is rewiring how American health institutions function.
This approach avoids the political costs of frontal assault. Americans broadly support disease preparedness, vaccine development, and pandemic response capabilities. Direct attacks would trigger fierce resistance.
Instead, COVID resentment provides cover for "reforms" that fundamentally alter institutional DNA. The new advisory committees will evaluate vaccines through different lenses. Research agencies will fund different priorities. Emergency preparedness will follow different philosophies.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at UC Law San Francisco, identifies the mechanism: COVID revenge serves as "leverage" enabling actions Kennedy "wouldn't be able to get away with otherwise."
This exploits a fundamental vulnerability in democratic governance. Institutions that depend on expert authority and public trust can be undermined far more easily than they can be rebuilt. It's asymmetric warfare against expertise itself—and expertise is losing.
The price of revenge
When America's next pandemic arrives, we'll discover the true cost of this institutional vandalism. And it will arrive. Bird flu continues spreading through livestock, having infected over 55 people. Climate change is expanding the range of mosquito-borne diseases. Global travel creates highways for viral spread.
The America that meets this crisis will be fundamentally weakened. The researchers developing next-generation vaccines will have switched careers or countries. The rapid response infrastructure built during COVID will lie in ruins. The advisory committees will lack the institutional memory and professional relationships that enable swift coordination.
Already, the brain drain has begun. Nobel laureate Drew Weissman, whose discoveries enabled mRNA vaccines, predicts America will "lose young scientists who will go overseas to do this work." Scientific expertise develops over decades. When researchers relocate, they take irreplaceable knowledge and networks with them.
Other nations aren't standing still. The European Union established its Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority with massive funding. China continues major vaccine development investments. American researchers, facing funding cuts and political hostility, are relocating to more supportive environments.
The Government Accountability Office has determined that NIH grant terminations violated federal law by withholding congressionally authorised funds. But legal victories can't restore destroyed capabilities or departed talent.
The trap is set
Former CDC director Tom Frieden captures the ultimate irony: policies justified as "restoring trust" in public health institutions may ultimately make those institutions ineffective when Americans need them most.
This represents perhaps the administration's most consequential legacy: using temporary political grievances about pandemic response to create permanent weaknesses in pandemic preparedness. Future leaders, regardless of party, will inherit a diminished capacity to protect Americans from infectious threats.
Gregory Poland of the Atria Research Institute sees the stakes clearly: "This will leave the nation less knowledgeable about and less prepared against all infectious diseases."
The next time a virus emerges—whether from nature or laboratory, whether targeting humans or agriculture—America may face it with institutions deliberately weakened by political revenge. The scientists who might have developed rapid countermeasures will be working for other governments. The advisory committees that might have guided swift responses will lack expertise and credibility. The research programmes that might have prepared defences will have been cancelled years earlier.
They're dismantling the fire department because they didn't like how the last fire was handled. The arsonists are delighted.
When that next pandemic strikes, we'll finally understand what COVID revenge actually cost: not accountability for past mistakes, but protection against future threats. The price will be paid not by those who crafted pandemic policies, but by ordinary Americans who trusted that someone, somewhere, was keeping watch against the diseases that have plagued humanity since the beginning of time.
That trust is being systematically betrayed. And the betrayal is being called public health protection.