The real epidemic is (again) the legacy media

Cyclospora is at least the fourth major media effort this year to make Americans believe that Robert F. Kennedy has destroyed their public health infrastructure. Total deaths: zero.

(Note: Yesterday the Free Press asked me to write about the cyclospora outbreak. I said I wasn’t sure there was much to say — the outbreak, though real, is highly hyped, yet another effort by legacy reporters to attack the Trump administration. Write that, they said. So I did. I’m glad they encouraged me — they published the piece this morning, and I offer a slightly longer version of it for you here.)

As you’ve heard by now, cyclospora is a nasty bug.

A parasite that spreads in fecal-contaminated water and food, it causes — in the words of the Cleveland Clinic — “watery, and sometimes explosive, diarrhea and other stomach problems.”

As you’ve also heard, the United States is having a major cyclospora outbreak, over 10,000 confirmed and probable cases, centered in Michigan and Ohio. (Go Big Ten!) A privately held, California-based produce company called Taylor Farms, which has over $7 billion in annual sales and 25,000 workers, appears to be the center of the outbreak, which is suspected to have started with lettuce imported from Mexico.

Now, naturally, legacy reporters are doing everything they can to connect this outbreak to their favorite colostomy bags, President Trump and his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Trump’s CDC cuts fueled a Cyclospora perfect storm,” CNN reported on Monday.

Except, as is so often the case, the legacy media narrative turns out to be full of watery (and sometimes explosive) reporting. Problems with American food safety, including deadly outbreaks from contaminated meat and produce, long predate the current administration.

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(Get your truths at the source! For pennies a day!)

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These dangers are partly inevitable, reflecting the sheer complexity and vast scale of national and international food sourcing and industrialized agriculture, which depends largely on self-regulation by farmers and slaughterhouses. They are partly by choice. Americans like their food cheap, plentiful, convenient, and premade. They will tolerate poisoning as the price.

Last year, the CDC estimated seven major foodborne pathogens had been responsible for 9.9 million infections, 53,000 hospitalizations and almost 1,000 deaths in 2019. This has been going on for decades, if not since The Jungle. A 2011 estimate found pathogens had caused 9.4 million infections, 55,000 hospitalizations, and over 1,300 deaths in 1999 (though the estimates are imprecise enough that it is not clear mortality actually fell between 1999 and 2019).

Stricter regulations and increased inspections might help. But the fact that we have allowed this problem to persist for generations, through Democratic and Republican administrations, suggests that the public has no, erm, appetite for the costs.

And by the standards of food safety, cyclospora, for all its grossness, is a minor risk. No one has died in this summer’s outbreak, and about 300 people have been hospitalized. Further, cyclospora is more difficult to track than many other bacteria or parasites; it sheds spores only intermittently, can require multiple tests to find, and has a relatively long incubation period, up to two weeks, raising the difficulty of contact tracing.

The real epidemic here is the relentless legacy media effort to attack Trump and Kennedy on public health issues. So far this year, reporters — aided by vengeful public health bureaucrats like the leather-clad (when not shirtless) Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases until he quit last August — have tried to rouse the public about four separate epidemics.

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(Is there a doctor in the club?)

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The first is the granddaddy of ‘em all, measles, the subject of at least 20 articles this year in The New York Times alone. Measles is indeed highly infectious, and I believe measles vaccinations are a good idea (though not without risk). But the articles blaming Kennedy for measles ignore three crucial facts:

1: Measles vaccination rates nationally remain very high, over 90 percent.

2: Many new cases are in unvaccinated adolescent and adult immigrants.

3: No one has died from measles in the United States in 2026.

Measles is simply not a major public health concern, and it will not become one for the foreseeable future.

As measles cases declined in late spring, reporters tried their hands at fanning the flames for hantavirus (remember hantavirus? it’s transmitted mostly by inhaled droppings from infected rodents, yum), which is not much of a threat despite its high mortality rate, because it is so hard to pass along. (I did not favor the Trump administration’s decision to confine potential hantavirus patients in isolation for weeks; lockdown was wrong for Covid, and it was wrong for hantavirus.)

Then, as the hantavirus threat faded, we were treated to the spectacle of Ebola, a media darling since the journalist Richard Preston famously (and falsely) wrote of sufferers crying “tears of blood.”

Ebola is a brutal and often deadly disease, but it too is hard to transmit. It generally requires contact with the blood or secretions of a person who has it. Underequipped African hospitals and African burial practices, which include the washing of corpses by friends and family of the dead, are ideal for spreading it, but it has never been a threat in developed countries.

The current epidemic is centered in the Congo, among the poorest and most violent countries in the world; even Congo’s neighbor Uganda, hardly a model of good governance, appears to have ended its outbreak.

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Your one-time donations at work!

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A fecal parasite, and three viruses: one highly contagious disease spread through the air, the second generally confined to rodent hosts, the third blood-borne.

Cyclospora, measles, hantavirus, Ebola.

They have almost nothing in common. Except the media efforts to use them as a cudgel against the Trump Administration.

And this.

They haven’t killed anyone in the United States this year.

Not one person, young, old, or in-between.

Meanwhile, despite all the good news you’ve heard about the opioid epidemic, almost 70,000 Americans have died from overdose in the last 12 months.

Priorities, priorities.