Cut Deep – What's at stake in the gutting of U.S. biodefense?

Send us Fan MailZombie movies may score at the box office and shows about dangerous contagions including “The Last of Us” may be a hit on streaming services, but preparedness for disasters is no winner for American politicians. Every recent U.S. presidential administration has dismantled the pandemic plan put together by the previous one, notes Dr. Asha M. George, Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. However, the cuts being made by the new Trump administration to the United States biodefense budget are going deeper than ever before. Global efforts to track diseases including Ebola virus and avian influenza have ended. Among the latest to fall under the axe: the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), a federal advisory body to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which had helped shape national infection prevention guidelines meant to keep hospitals safe and contain outbreaks. The loss of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, has already begun devastating not only global health efforts, but also U.S. national security efforts, multiple experts say. And things were not in a good place to begin with, says George. “The biodefense community is in for the fight of its life to get the funding it needs,” she said in her latest report on biodefense. “It was starving before. It is going to be anorexic soon.” Listen as George explains to One World, One Health host Maggie Fox just what’s at risk for the world if the United States doesn’t start paying attention to biodefense.