Coronavirus threat reveals impact of Trump budget cuts

Americans are just beginning to understand the price to be paid for failing to adequately invest in science.

No one knows how many lives will be lost or what the total economic impact of the coronavirus will be. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said that the coronavirus had infected more than 80,000 people and killed nearly 3,000. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its worst one- day drop, falling more than 1,193 points. The decline for the week has wiped out an estimated $2 trillion in value for the S& P 500 and, if it holds, would rank in the top 20 for the Dow’s steepest weekly sell- off.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of America’s coronavirus response and insisted that the country is “very, very ready” to tackle the deadly disease. That sentiment ignores that the United States would be vastly better prepared if the president hadn’t made inexcusable budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health, limiting their ability to prevent the outbreak and spread of deadly diseases.

Now we face the likelihood of the coronavirus spreading in the United States. “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization, said Tuesday. “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”

In 2005, in the wake of the threat posed by the H5N1 avian flu virus, we noted that public health experts had said it’s only a matter of time before a deadly pandemic sweeps the globe. We urged Congress to appropriate funding to defend against a pandemic, arguing that hospital costs alone could top an estimated $450 billion. President George W. Bush called for $7.1 billion to prepare for a pandemic, and President Barack Obama continued its funding during his eight years in office.

Fast-forward to 2018, the year that the CDC announced it was ending 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because of Trump’s budget cuts. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Trump administration in October shut down its “Predict” program, which was specifically designed to research and thwart animal viruses around the world that might cause a pandemic. Predict workers, for example, had closed markets where animals were improperly butchered and took other steps to prevent animals such as bats from spreading disease to other animals.

It’s possible that the coronavirus threat will fade, as the Ebola, swine flu, H5N1 and SARS outbreaks did in previous years. But even if it does, the potential disastrous impact of pandemics justifies the relatively small investment in scientific programs designed to prevent them.