Amid growing concerns about hantavirus, Trump haunted by repeated misjudgments

by Steve Benen | May 11, 2026 | Health, Maddowblog, News, Politics

Last Thursday, during a presidential field trip to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he’d received a hantavirus briefing. He acknowledged that he had. Asked what he’d learned, the president said he and his team “hope” the matter is under control.

When a reporter quickly followed up, “Should Americans be concerned it’s going to spread?” Trump replied, “I hope not.”

The exchange didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Nevertheless, a day later, during another White House Q&A, he added that “very good people” have looked into the threat and concluded that hantavirus transmissions are difficult. “We hope that’s true,” Trump said.

For those with PTSD from the Republican’s failure to respond responsibly to the Covid crisis six years ago, his unscripted comments were hardly reassuring. But more important than what Trump has said is what he has done. The Associated Press reported:

No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

While the United States has traditionally taken a leadership role in response to issues like these, the AP report added, “It has been health experts in other countries … who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.”

Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University, told the AP, “The CDC is not even a player. I’ve never seen that before.”

In hindsight, perhaps uprooting

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Why Trump’s third choice for surgeon general is just as problematic as his first two

by Steve Benen | May 1, 2026 | Health, Maddowblog, News, Politics

It was about a year ago when Donald Trump abandoned his first choice to serve as surgeon general, Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, pulling her nomination without explanation. This week, the president also gave up on his second choice, a wellness influencer named Casey Means, who faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate due to her obvious lack of qualifications.

This set the stage for the White House’s third choice: Dr. Nicole Saphier, a former Fox News contributor and radiologist, whom the president described as “an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR” who will “help ‘MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.’”

A NOTUS report noted, “The mere fact that Saphier has a professional medical background … is likely to increase her odds of confirmation greatly.” That’s probably true, though it was a jarring observation to see in print: We’ve reached the point at which a surgeon general nominee is positioned to succeed, not by earning a reputation as a celebrated public health professional, but by merely having “a professional medical background.”

That said, as Saphier’s nomination moves forward, there are a couple of key details that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that the nominee’s record on matters of science and medicine is not without controversy. As The New Republic summarized:

While Saphier is a radiologist, she’s not much better than Means. She has weighed in culture war issues on Fox, railing against movies with “woke ideologies.” … Her stance on vaccination is also troubling, as she has criticized mask and vaccine mandates and praised Trump for allowing military servicemembers expelled for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine back into the service.

An Ars Technica report added that Saphier also founded an

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