Whooping cough (pertussis), a vaccine-preventable disease that can be deadly to infants, was nearly eradicated in the US after vaccines were introduced in the 1940s. This year, it's on track to infect more Americans than in any year since 1948, reports The New York Academy of Sciences. In November 2024, Washington state recorded its first pertussis death since 2011. So far in 2025, Idaho and North Dakota have recorded deaths from whooping cough, two babies have died in Louisiana, and two more have died in Kentucky, where only "86% of kindergarteners and 85% of seventh graders are up to date on their required pertussis immunizations."
Seasonal flu has killed more children this year than at any time in the past 15 years. Declining vaccination rates mean there will be more hospitalizations during the 2024-25 flu season than in any year since the CDC began tracking hospitalizations in 2011 — with the possible exception of Trump's first full flu season of 2017-18, which saw 710,000 hospitalizations and tens of thousands of preventable deaths.
The Biden administration, of course, made a valiant attempt to protect Americans from a potentially bad flu season. But those efforts were swept aside during RFK Jr.'s first week on the job in February when — even as weekly flu hospitalizations soared to a 15-year high — the new HHS boss killed the CDC's highly effective "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign.
Measles, declared eliminated from the US in 2000, has in 2025 spread to 35 jurisdictions as of June 13, reports the CDC. Kids under 5 account for 29% of the 1,197 confirmed cases, with those aged 5-19 accounting for 37% more. Twelve percent of cases have required hospitalization. Three deaths have been reported. The recent surge follows reporting that, during the 2023-24 school year, only 93% of US kindergarteners were fully vaccinated, falling below the 95% threshold the WHO says is needed to maintain herd immunity.
Polio was eliminated from the US in the 1970s, but the Trump administration is taking all the steps necessary to make the crippling disease great again. Polio re-emerged in New York in 2022 where, after one unvaccinated person was left paralyzed, wastewater surveillance found the virus had been spreading silently in the area for months. Trump's January executive order withdrawing the US from the WHO has exacerbated a funding gap which could bring global efforts to eradicate polio to a halt in 2026. Vaccination rates for polio have fallen below 90% in 13 US states and have sunk to just 80% in Idaho. Trump's deep cuts to public health spending will, among other things, put a stop to the wastewater testing America needs to track polio's future spread. Meanwhile, RFK Jr's efforts to dismantle established vaccine policy include a dangerous plan to re-test safe, effective, and long-proven vaccines with placebos while taking advice from a lawyer on a mission to get FDA approval for the polio vaccine revoked.
COVID-19 remains a major public health threat, causing significant hospitalizations and deaths, especially among the elderly and immunocompromised. Despite that, the Trump administration is sending a clear message that Covid is no big deal. Your kids will be fine. Just ignore the fact that de-emphasizing Covid vaccines for kids means that new variants will spread rapidly within schools and be transmitted swiftly back to the most vulnerable members of local communities, including younger siblings. (In the under-18 population, infants less that 6 months old have the highest rate of Covid-19–associated hospitalizations.) Also ignore that Covid is constantly mutating and new variants — like the Omicron-descendant Nimbus now surging in China — inevitably reach US shores, contributing to new waves of infection. And that, for many who catch Covid, fully recovering physically and mentally can take a year or more.
Recent CDC data shows that Covid-19 hospitalization rates continue to have summer and winter peaks, with many hospitalizations occurring outside the typical respiratory virus season. While Trump's February 2025 executive order to "defund" schools with Covid vaccine mandates was largely symbolic, it was followed by RFK, Jr.'s May announcement that Covid-19 vaccines would be removed from the CDC's recommended immunization schedules for healthy children and pregnant women, and, three days later, by the actual CDC guidance that parents should consult with their clinicians to decide if the vaccine was right for their kids. Meanwhile, Trump's FDA announced new plans to recommend Covid vaccinations this fall only for Americans 65+ and those with medical conditions. If insurers aren't obliged to pay for vaccinations for those not included in the new guidance, it's expected that America's already-low uptake of annual boosters (currently around 25%) will plunge even further, even as the nation's herd immunity wanes.
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) present an ever-present and, in some communities, growing threat to public health. Continued surveillance is essential to make sure Americans get the treatment they need — and that the effectiveness of treatments can be measured and maintained. Yet, even before Trump installed RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, The Guardian notes: "years of flagging public health funding already meant that the US had some of the highest STI rates in the developed world in four diseases tracked by public health authorities: chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV and syphilis."
- HIV/AIDS affects more than one million Americans, with tens of thousands of new cases diagnosed each year. Because treatment requires lifelong antiviral therapy, HIV is the most costly STI for US taxpayers: "According to recent estimates, the total lifetime direct medical cost of incident STIs is $15.9 billion (2019 dollars), with the majority due to HIV ($13.7 billion)."
- Human papilloma virus (HPV) is the leading cause of cervical cancer in the US, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths each year. Vaccines can prevent 90% of those cancers, but the percentage of women being screened for cervical cancer has fallen from 47% in 2019 to 41% in 2023. Reports NBC News: "Rural women are 25% more likely to be diagnosed and 42% more likely to die from cervical cancer than women who live in cities."
- Chlamydia, often symptomless, is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the United States and is major cause of infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy among women. On the rise since 2020, it is estimated that millions of new cases (56% among persons aged 15-24) are occurring each year, with the majority going unreported.
- Syphilis is surging in parts of the country, including Wisconsin, where cases have multiplied 1,450% since 2019. Nationally, the number of babies born with congenital syphilis grew more than 10X between 2012 and 2022.
- Gonorrhea, remains common in 15-24 year olds and, if untreated, causes serious complications, including for babies when passed along at birth. As the CDC itself said in 2024, "gonorrhea is skilled at outsmarting the antibiotics that are used to kill it. For this reason, we must continuously monitor for resistance and encourage the research and development of new drugs for gonorrhea treatment."
In April, reports The Washington Post, the Trump administration shut down "the only lab in the U.S. capable of testing for and tracking antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, or 'super gonorrhea.'" It was one of three labs in the world working alongside the World Health Organization (WHO) to monitor the disease.
As Healio.com noted:
The functions provided by the CDC lab do not exist anywhere else in the United States. The lab is home to 50,000 unique gonorrhea isolates, the largest such collection in the world... Closing it means the country will be unprepared for any changes in gonorrhea that might affect treatment, and for new outbreaks of other sexually transmitted infections such as mpox.
Experts told The Guardian that the complete elimination of the CDC's STD Laboratory Reference and Research Branch was "one of the most shocking cuts" of the DOGE era.
And Team Trump's attacks on public health didn't stop there.
On June 9, RFK, Jr. fired the CDC's entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The New York Times described it as "the latest in a series of moves that Mr. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, has made to dismantle decades of policy standards for immunizations."
RFK, Jr. underscored his hostility toward vaccines by replacing the ACIP members he fired with a gang of likeminded nitwits who, writes Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health in The Washington Post, are mostly unqualified, "lack relevant expertise" and "have promoted dangerous falsehoods."
What does all this mean?
It means that an anti-science, anti-vax minority — headed by Trump and his appointees — is not simply in charge of of America's health. It's making America more vulnerable to the next flu season, the next pandemic, the threat of bird flu, the return of measles, whooping cough, and polio, the growing danger of drug-resistant STIs, and the potential spread of Mpox and dengue fever.
It means that state and local health departments are seeing funding that was approved by Trump 1.0 getting slashed by Trump 2.0, severely limiting their ability to protect the public from infectious diseases.
It means that Christian Nationalist states that insist on abstinence-only education without addressing the fundamental issue that American teenagers just keep on fucking, will guarantee that STIs continue to spread with damaging, sometimes deadly, consequences.
Above all, it means that our mentally feeble, 79-year-old President, whose own cognitive decline may have been accelerated by a severe case of Covid in 2020, has put us on a course where, according to Dr. Fiona Havers, a vaccine expert who spoke to The New York Times after quitting the CDC this week: "a lot of Americans are going to die."
Thanks for reading! While paid subscriptions (billed to TLD Media LLC) and one-time tips are always welcome, all content to this ad-free newsletter is free, so subscribe for $0 and you won’t miss anything. And feel free to share this content knowing there’s never a paywall!
P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
From the Unprecedented archives:
Worst President Scenario, March 7, 2020: Before lockdowns began, I explained the "perfect storm" America faced from Covid-19 because: "Trump wasted all of January. He wasted all of February. He destroyed the infrastructure our government needs to handle the crisis. Now, instead of bringing the country together and speaking honestly about the challenge, he’s denying, distracting and attacking—and making every decision with an eye to his re-election prospects."
Worst President Scenario
Trump’s multiple faults are transforming the coronavirus into a perfect storm
Richard Hine
A Trump-Created Tragedy, March 10, 2022: As America approached one million Covid deaths (with the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of those deaths had been preventable), I detailed how "Trump’s relentless incompetence and psychopathic recklessness—aided and abetted by Fox News—turned Year One of the Covid-19 pandemic into an unmitigated disaster for America."
A Trump-Created Tragedy
In Year One of Covid, Trump’s recklessness and incompetence put America on the path to 1,000,000 dead.
Richard Hine
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.