Guess Who Canceled U.S. Hantavirus Research Last Year, at the Height of DOGE?
Researchers would have been studying this exact Andean strain of hantavirus already, until the Trump administration revoked their funding.
Photo via Unsplash, CDC HealthSplinter hantavirus
The most vicious casualty of the DOGE era will forever be the forward-thinking, preventative measures that were sacrificed and slashed so a handful of barely legal-to-drink Elon Musk acolytes could pretend to save the government a few bucks … that we then immediately funneled into new forms of waste, ultimately saving nothing. The Iran War, for instance, cost in its first few days the same amount that an organization like USAid would have used to save a million lives worldwide. The big problem is, when you’re cutting things like research and prophylactic preparation, that you’ll never know quite how necessary those things might be until later, when they’re suddenly and critically necessary. Case in point: In mid-2025, when the Trump administration was stripping the funding of research centers studying an obscure “Andes virus” strain of the rodent-borne hantavirus, who could have known that by May of 2026 the disease in question would be splashed over global headlines following a deadly cruise ship outbreak? But that’s just the thing: Responsible countries fund such research with the knowledge that it may or may not end up being of paramount importance. Stupid countries (which Marco Rubio insists we are not) just hack and slash at seemingly pointless research, and then they pay the price.
We are obviously the latter, in this scenario. Even if the deadly Andes virus that began with an outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius ultimately doesn’t spread far, the fact that we canceled relevant research specifically into this hantavirus strain just last year is perfectly indicative of how the Trump administration’s callous disregard for science and disaster preparation leaves us vulnerable to the ever-present threat of epidemiological catastrophe. This is the ultimate in myopic government thumb-twiddling: Anything that isn’t a crisis right now, at exactly this moment, is not worth the expenditure of preparing for. How ridiculous is it that we find ourselves in this kind of position in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that is estimated to have killed 1.2 million Americans? Any normal, competent government would be expected to respond to the COVID era with intensely increased vigilance toward infectious disease, bordering on unnerving paranoia. You would expect such a country to learn a lesson in its bones, and to subsequently dedicate far more resources to preparing for the threat of future pandemics and transmissible disease, with the attitude of “never again.” Instead, we respond by slashing the research that would help us identify and better understand the next killer disease. Yeah, I don’t think we’re beating the “stupid country” allegations any time soon.
In 2025, Trump canceled funding for a pilot project studying the hantavirus, which has been confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship.
The NIH cut funding, saying that its research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans & not a good use of taxpayer funding.”
— Graphic Granola (@graphicgranola.bsky.social) May 8, 2026 at 5:02 PM
More specifically, the Trump administration eliminated funding in June of 2025 for a group of 10 research centers that were called the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network, established with the goal of preventing future pandemics. The network of globally based research centers was launched five years earlier with a total of $82 million in funding “to collect and characterize mosquito-borne viruses and other pathogens that could jump from animals to people.” One of the specific centers within it, the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, had been studying hantaviruses of the region, when they were contacted by groups of researchers in Argentina hoping to secure funding to include the Andes virus among those being studied. They successfully applied for a pilot award and achieved that funding to study the same strain of the hantavirus that recently killed three cruise ship passengers and infected a handful of others, including at least one U.S. citizen, only to then be cut off from those funds.
The National Institutes of Health had reportedly planned to renew funding to the network in 2025, until word came down from on high that we would instead be axing all 10 of the research centers. A stop-work order stated that the research of the centers “has been deemed unsafe for Americans a not a good use of taxpayer funding. Current agency priorities do not support this work.” Not explained: What was meant to be “unsafe” at any of the research centers, something that RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services refused to comment on to the journal Science at the time.
As is so often the case, the scientific community objected at the time to the slashing of novel research into potentially deadly diseases that could be implicated in future outbreaks or pandemics, only to be roundly ignored by those signing the checks. Kris Smith, a CREID postdoctoral researcher from Washington State University who was working in Kenya, expressed obvious frustration: “I’m disappointed that this and other research aimed at identifying and preventing future pandemics has been deemed unsafe and useless.”
Virologist David Wang of St. Louis’ Washington University, the leader of another CREID center, likewise said the cancelation of their work was “incredibly short sighted,” saying that “If we can detect and stop a virus where it starts, that directly makes America and American citizens safer.” Now, like Cassandra, he has to sit back and watch his prediction come to pass.
Trump on Hantavirus: I hope it’s fine.
In the case of this specific hantavirus strain, research into the Andes virus would have been particularly critical given that we really barely know anything about it, beyond the fact that it is far more deadly on average than a disease like COVID-19. It is the only known form of hantavirus that has been documented spreading from human-to-human, unusual in a disease that is typically spread by contamination from rodent feces. Scientists have no clue as to the vector by which the Andes virus actually spreads from person to person; whether it solely involves direct exposure to bodily fluids or whether it can spread through aerosol droplets or survive on surfaces for an extended period of time. The research funded by CREID would have been directly studying modes of transmission that are not well understood, for a virus that has rarely had outbreaks. As a result of that research’s cancelation, we are measurably more poorly prepared for this moment than we would have been otherwise. It’s as simple as that.
“The continuation of the CREID program will help to further reduce response times to emerging infectious disease threats, improve pathogen discovery pipelines, and enhance regional capacity for data-driven public health interventions,” wrote researchers in early 2025, as they made the case for the continuation of their important work.
The Trump administration, however, had other plans. After all, why bother studying a disease that isn’t currently killing any Americans? Why study anything, when you can fund a few weeks of bombing Iran instead?
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