In 2018, the Trump administration made a quiet yet catastrophic decision: it cut key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) positions embedded in foreign countries, especially China. These epidemiologists and public health experts were America’s front line against global outbreaks. Their job was to detect and help contain emerging threats before they reached U.S. shores.
The rationale? Cost-cutting and a broader strategy to dismantle what Trump often called the “deep state.” Public health infrastructure, both at home and abroad, was seen as expendable. Positions in more than 30 countries were scaled back or eliminated. Most critically, the CDC office in Beijing—tasked with working directly with Chinese officials on outbreak response—was drastically reduced.
When SARS-CoV-2 began spreading in late 2019, the United States lacked on-the-ground intelligence. Trump officials claimed China hadn’t been transparent, but the absence of U.S. personnel made that lack of transparency even harder to challenge. The early window to contain the virus—narrow in the best circumstances—was lost entirely.
Experts had long warned that pandemic preparedness required a global presence. Trump ignored them. When COVID-19 began its deadly march across the planet, the very infrastructure meant to serve as our early warning system had been dismantled on his watch.
The irony is bitter: a man obsessed with building walls to keep threats out had, in fact, torn down the watchtowers that might have saved lives.
Why did you vote for him again in November 2024?
Occupy 2.5 
Hello from the UK
In 2020 the authorities rebranded the ‘flu which was why the ‘flu almost disappeared from the statistics to be replaced by COVID 19.
There was therefore no novel virus to spread, it was just made to seem so by persistent advertising and deceit. This has been done before and still people fall for it.
Hello from across the ocean — and let me stop you right there.
The claim that COVID-19 was “just rebranded flu” is not only false, it’s dangerous. We know this for several reasons:
Genetic sequencing: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was fully sequenced in early 2020. Its genome is distinct from influenza viruses. (Wu et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020).
Clinical differences: COVID-19 caused widespread clotting, long-term organ damage, and “long COVID.” Flu does not behave this way. Doctors worldwide immediately recognized they were treating something new and far deadlier (Gupta et al., 2020; Nalbandian et al., 2021).
Excess mortality: Global death spikes in 2020–2021 were well above normal flu seasons — in some countries, five to ten times higher. That’s not a PR trick; that’s human loss on a massive scale (Woolf et al., 2020; Kontis et al., 2020).
Data transparency: Independent labs, not “authorities,” confirmed the presence of the virus. If it were just “advertising,” you’d have seen whistleblowers and lab results proving otherwise. None exist, because the virus was real (Callaway et al., 2020).
Now, was COVID weaponized politically? Absolutely. Was it exploited for profit? Without a doubt — Big Pharma made billions. Were governments deceptive at times? Of course. But none of that changes the science: COVID-19 was a novel coronavirus, not “just flu.”
We can (and should) critique how power handled the crisis, how neoliberal states failed to protect workers, and how authoritarian leaders used fear to tighten their grip. But denying that the virus existed at all isn’t resistance — it’s handing ammunition to the very people who thrive on confusion. That kind of narrative only weakens the fight against fascism and corporate greed.
So yes — question authority. Expose propaganda. Demand accountability. But let’s not erase the millions who died or the families still grieving. They deserve truth, not a rewrite.
References
Callaway, E., Cyranoski, D., Mallapaty, S., Stoye, E., & Tollefson, J. (2020). The coronavirus pandemic in five powerful charts. Nature, 579(7800), 482-483. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00758-2
Gupta, A., Madhavan, M. V., Sehgal, K., Nair, N., Mahajan, S., Sehrawat, T. S., … & Mehra, M. R. (2020). Extrapulmonary manifestations of COVID-19. Nature Medicine, 26(7), 1017–1032. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0968-3
Kontis, V., Bennett, J. E., Rashid, T., Parks, R. M., Pearson-Stuttard, J., Guillot, M., … & Ezzati, M. (2020). Magnitude, demographics and dynamics of the effect of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on all-cause mortality in 21 industrialized countries. Nature Medicine, 26(12), 1919–1928. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1112-0
Nalbandian, A., Sehgal, K., Gupta, A., Madhavan, M. V., McGroder, C., Stevens, J. S., … & Wan, E. Y. (2021). Post-acute COVID-19 syndrome. Nature Medicine, 27(4), 601–615. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01283-z
Woolf, S. H., Chapman, D. A., Sabo, R. T., Weinberger, D. M., & Hill, L. (2020). Excess deaths from COVID-19 and other causes, March–July 2020. JAMA, 324(15), 1562–1564. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.19545
Wu, F., Zhao, S., Yu, B., Chen, Y. M., Wang, W., Song, Z. G., … & Zhang, Y. Z. (2020). A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China. Nature, 579(7798), 265–269. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2008-3
Zhou, P., Yang, X. L., Wang, X. G., Hu, B., Zhang, L., Zhang, W., … & Shi, Z. L. (2020). A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature, 579(7798), 270–273. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2012-7