(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . An Epidemic of Epidemics [1] ['Crystal Ray', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Ice Blue'] Date: 2026-08-05 The third is the COVID-19 mask, adorned with images and models of SARS-Cov-2 generated by electron microscopes, scientific theories, and AI assisted computer modeling. A pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people mediated by viruses. — Ian Allen Paul (2020) Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional. — Larry Brilliant (Mackenzie 2020) Bundibugyo ebolavirus. Cyclospora cayetanensis. Lentivirus. Rubeola. Orthohantavirus. Vibrio vulnificus, Cochliomyia hominivorax. Feeling healthy again? No reason to pandemic yet, just some epidemics here and there. To bad the U.S. programs aimed at dealing with them were gutted by Elon Musk (DOGE) and JFK, Jr. (Health and Human Services). But at least we have ever mutating and increasing AI programs to help us. And a government sure to get to the heart of the most improbable conspiracies spreading like a virus among the minds of the MAGA faithful, which includes most of the federal government of the United States of America. I published a book about all this a long time ago, way back in 2025. Few have read it. But if you are among that select company, none of this should surprise you. This is the Viral Age. In the three great realms of today — the biological, the digital, the cultural — viral phenomena are profoundly shaping us and our possible tomorrows. Take the biological, much in the news today. Right now we are enjoying the fastest spreading outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in the world ever, the worst outbreak of explosive diarrhea in the U.S. ever, a return of measles from extinction in the U.S., tens of thousands of more AIDs deaths a year in the world, a new outbreak of the rare but deadly Hantavirus on a cruise ship, flesh eating bacterium outbreaks on beaches along the U.S. East Coast, and the return of screwworm flies to feast on U.S. cattle a half-century after their eradication. These are not unrelated accidents or inevitable fluctuations. The climate crisis plays an important role in the spread of all of these infestations, but in each of these biological (3 viruses, 2 parasites, 1 bacterium) viral outbreaks there is also plenty of blame for Trump and his administration. Ebola Virus “The deadliest Ebola outbreak in history is happening right now”!!! So screamed the headline in a Vox article from over a decade ago when Orthoebolavirus zairense killed 49 people around Boende town in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 11,308 in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. A new outbreak of a strain called Bundibugyo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is causing growing concern. It isn’t just the number of cases (3,075 confirmed, probably many more as most new cases are surprises) or deaths (over 1,354 for sure), so far (July 25) (Ali 2026, CDC 2026b). It actually is less lethal than earlier variants, but it is spreading much quicker. In the first 20 days it spread almost twice as fast as the 2014-2016 West African outbreak and 10 times faster than most other outbreaks. It already is the second largest outbreak recorded, and “on its way to being the worst outbreak ever.” (Khalili-Tari, Daniel and Reuters 2026) There is no vaccine for this variant, but one is starting trials (Weaver, Wu and Zarracina 2026; Mullin 2026a). Cyclospora Parasite If you don’t think Trump can be unintentionally and very darkly funny, consider that he is spreading explosive diarrhea across America (Cooper 2026). That is where we are, heaven for comics and hell for the rest of us. Of course, we were all shocked to learn that one of the many wonderful accomplishments of the Trump administration has been to save money by stopping the monitoring of the very parasite that causes the worst outbreak of such gastrointestinal unpleasantness in the nation’s history. (Grenoble 2026) And not just Cyclospora. By ending its funding of Foodnet, a whole network of food monitoring disappeared, as many states who were participating ended their involvement as well. So expect more issues with the food chain, especially listeria (KFF 2026). And, just a head’s up, the same cutbacks hit screwworm prevention (see below), bird flu tracking, medical device inspectors, and research on how to help domestic violence survivors who are pregnant. (Grenoble 2026) HIV Virus Since it began, the AIDS pandemic has killed 44.2 million people and infected almost 100 million. 41 million live with AIDS today. While it was declining until recently, in 2025 there were 1.2 million new AIDs infections, and 570,000 deaths. (UNAIDS 2026) It is a slow, almost hidden, pandemic far from over, growing again thanks to massive cuts by the Trump administration under the leadership of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and his team of well paid inexperienced technopolitical operatives called DOGE. 1,700 treatment sites were closed and funding to fight the disease fell almost 20%. One special program, the ironically named “US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR)” cut treatment for children by 77,000. (Seboual 2026) Excess deaths are inevitable. Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDs, said the cuts mandated by DOGE were a “slow death sentence” on an unknown number of people. As to Elon Musk’s claim that the cuts had resulted in “zero” deaths, he remarked, “I do not know where Elon Musk gets his data from, but he [is] showing ignorance of the disease.” (Seboual 2026) Infection rates are increasing and already thousands of people have died who would have lived if Musk had not intervened. If these cuts aren’t replaced by other funders soon, it is estimated that by 2030 there will be 4.2 million more AIDS related deaths, including 300,000 children. (UNAIDS 2026) Measles Thanks to the rise of anti-vaxers in the Federal government, Measles, one of the most infectious disease of all, has made a comeback in the United States (Mullin 2026b). As of May 29, 2026 The MAHA measles resurgence has killed at least three people, and infected over 4200, with almost 400 hospitalized (CDC Measles 2026). Because the disease was eradicated before great treatments could be developed for the worst cases, now that it has returned there are only limited options at this point. Science is rushing to fill this gap created by this anti-science policy but, for now, there is not direct way to treat the virus once it has attacked a host. (Mullin 2026b) Hantivirus Hantivirus is rare, less than 1,000 cases are recorded. While mainly caught from desert rodents sometimes it does spreads in cruise ships full of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and pretending to be Democratic) people, which makes the media take notice. With no vaccine, no specific treatment, and a mortality rate of around one third, epidemiologists do fear it will mutate ways to spread easily to and among humans. It is significantly improving, as the latest outbreak proves. (Williams 2026) Meanwhile, Secretary of Health JFK jr. is putting the panic into pandemic by ordering the forced quarantine of a women exposed to Hantavirus, overruling the experts who said she was no longer a threat. Such public health arrests should only happen with absolutely necessary, not when some road kill gourmet with a famous name decides that while masks and vaccines are horrible oppressions, locking someone up for the crime of once being infectious is necessity (Golgowski 2026) Vibrio vulnificus bacterium Major cuts in Federal monitoring has led to a number of public health officials and scientists becoming deeply concerned about outbreaks of Flesh-Eating Bacterium on beaches across the East Coast, specifically Long Island, Florida, and Mississippi which have all issued warnings. The fatality rate is 25% and many survivors suffer deep tissue removals and amputations. (Thor 2026) Screwworm (blowfly lavare) Using sterilized male screwworms (which are actually blowflies) bred in a network of facilities from Florida to Texas and down through Mexico to Panama an international coalition of governments and scientists forced the flesh eating parasites ( specifically the larvae laid in wounds on any warm blooded animal) below the Darian Gap. So successful was the campaign that it was reduced to one breeding program in Panama. Apparently, that was not sufficient. Screwworms started slowly spreading north through Central America. (Bush 2026) When it made it to Southern Mexico in 2023, the Biden administration cut off importing Mexican cattle. The Trump administration ended that in 2024. In 2025 the Trump administration cut 1,300 workers in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and DOGE specifically closed all the screwworm monitoring programs as well. (Dayen 2026) It wasn’t long until the parasite appeared in Texas for the first time since 1966. So a ban on cattle imports from Mexico was again imposed. Not for long, however. The Trump administration reversed course and put profits over pandemic and have again allowed the importation of Mexican cattle. (Yarrow and Brown 2026) All this unpleasantness was predictable. Viral phenomena grow and decline depending on their hosts, vectors (of contagion), catalysts and controls of their spread. By massively cutting back on controls and the monitoring of vectors, Musk and Trump have turbo-charged a large array of dangerous infections. As Sophocles wrote in Oedipus tyrannous (476 BCE) “All plagues follow bad leadership.” Case in point, Trump, the Typhoid Mary superspreader of the MAGA virus, of which MAHA is a variant. The spread of these cultural contagions is a catalyst for today’s epidemic of epidemics. So Trump doesn’t just spread the MAGA virus (typical symptoms are racism, misogyny, fear, hate and stupidity), he literally facilitates the spread of biological viruses as well. While Elon Musk certainly played a clear roll in cutting these programs, the overall Trumpian policy of ending USAID and potentially killing millions of people was imposed by Trump’s director of the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), Russell Voight. A self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist, rejected a proposal to cut USAID funding in half at a February 12, 2025 meeting and asked what a larger cut would mean. “More people would die,” was the expert reply. “You could say that about any of the cuts,” Vought replied. (Van Duyse 2026) Musk did support the gutting of U.S. support for confronting various ongoing and possible pandemics (tuberculous, HIV/AIDS, hantavirus, ccrewworm, measles). He called USAID “a radical-left political psy-op” and a “crazy waste of money.” Of course, the epidemics his policy has unleashed will cost much, much more that any savings. Even a small screwworm outbreak will cost almost 2 billion dollars. (Orrico 2026) And that is in money. In lives there is no comparison. One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was we need more research earlier on emerging diseases. The contentious debate on the origins of COVID-19 is still not over. Although the evidence is stronger for a source in the wild, a lab origin is also a possibility. Whether or not COVID-19 came from the wild meat market in Wuhan or the lab there, the lessons are the same — wild nature is dangerous AND gain-of-function research is dangerous. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) Network in 2020. They ran 10 labs around the world to study disease outbreaks, including two in Ebola territory. Incidentally, they also studied hantiviruses like the one that caused the outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius, killing 3. DOGE shut CREID down. Why was this key defense against deadly pandemics closed down in 2025? It was actually quite cheap ($82 million over 5 years), considering the lives and economic costs it could have helped save. Well, from the MAHA/MAGA perspective it was “unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding.” The evidence? Tenuous connections to a lab that was linked to another lab where COVID-19 might have (but probably not) originated. (Mullin 2026a) But it wasn’t just the NIH and the CREID network that were destroyed. As Elon Musk bragged, they fed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) “to the wood chipper.” An analysis by Prof. Atul Gawande of Harvard University’s School of Public Health shows that shutting USAID had already “resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition” by late 2025 (Feldscher). When the whole picture is taken in, U.S. and related European cuts to medical aid since Trump’s second election, especially for infectious diseases, could lead to 22 million avoidable deaths, including of 5.4 million children under the age of 5, by 2030 (Lay 2026). Who are these victims? Poor people, children, workers, black and brown inhabitants of the Global South. As Steven W. Thrasher teaches us, “When we follow the virus—any virus, really—we follow the fault lines of our culture.” (2022, p. 5) His powerful book on his HIV activism and research The Viral Underclass is about how the powerless suffer disproportionately from all forms of viral infection, not just the biological. He shows this by following the vectors of inequality that target the most vulnerable in every society. Viruses magnify inequalities and injustices. They might not “consciously discriminate, because viruses have no consciousness” but “effects do discriminate against the bodies of the underclass.” Some people are put “in proximity to danger” by the very ways our society is structured at the behest of the powerful. Poor people don’t drown in hurricanes because water molecules have it in for them, they drown because of the “built environment of society” that keeps water away from the rich to be dumped on the poor. (Thrasher 2022, pp. 5-6) As income disparities increase exponentially, the Viral Underclass expands as well. It isn’t only poor people who get explosive diarrhea, AIDs, Measles, or flesh-eating bacteria from a day trip to the beach. We can take it further. In the face of generative AI, which improves itself and spreads like a virus, it is clear that many who lose their jobs or have a loved one kill themselves encouraged by a chat app end up in the Viral Underclass. And all of us are having our intelligence degraded, our art slopified, our society enshitified. What does this mean culturally? The targets of infectious MAGA conspiracies powered by viral AI on social platforms can end up in the Viral Underclass—if they aren’t already there—deported, shot in the street, jailed for being Anti-Fascist. Or pull on another thread, Ebola is spreading because of deforestation (which adds to the climate crisis) caused by the mining of gold and rare minerals in the Congo. The very same rare elements needed to make the chips AI needs. (Shah 2026). This is why we call it a polycrisis—so many crisis, so intimately linked. We can’t know which beastie or mad idea will become the next outbreak, epidemic or even world wide pandemic, but we can be sure something nasty and viral this way comes. Best we prepare. References All citations not directly referenced here are from my 2025 Virus is a Language: AI, QAnon and COVID-19 and the New Abnormal (Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press). Ali, Faisal (2026) “Ebola deaths in DRC surge past 1,300 as virus ‘spreading like a wildfire’,” Al Jazeera, July 25. Associated Press editors (2026) “Young men storm a Congo hospital treating Ebola patients to demand the bodies of their relatives,” CNN, May 25. Bush, Evan (2026) “The U.S. fought the flesh-eating screwworm for decades. Now it begins again,” NBC News, June 7. CDC (2026a) “History of Ebola Outbreaks.” CDC (2026b) “Ebola Outbreak. Current Situation.” (June 18) CDC Measles (2026) “Measles (Rubeola).” Cooper, Ryan (2026) “How Donald Trump Created the Worst Diarrhea Outbreak This Century.” The American Prospect, July 16. Dayen, David (2026) “Why That Next Hamburger Is Going to Cost You,” The American Prospect, June 9. Feldscher, Karen (2025) “USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths,” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, November 20. Golgowski, Nina (2026) “RFK Jr. Orders Woman to Remain In Hantavirus Quarantine Against Medical Expert’s Advice,” Huffington Post, June 16. Gray, Chris Hables (2025) Virus is a Language: AI, QAnon and COVID-19 and the New Abnormal, Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press. _____, (2014): Agency, (Re)Invention, and the Internet: The Limits of High Theory, Science as Culture, DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2014.913560 Grenoble, Ryan (2026) “CDC Stopped Monitoring Parasite Now Causing Explosive Diarrhea Across The Country,” Huffpost, July 10. KeithDB (2026) “Three Current Epidemic Are Precursors For What Is Coming,” Daily Kos, July 26. KFF (2026) “Cyclospora boosts fears that deadlier food borne outbreaks are ahead,” Daily Kos, July 29 Khalili-Tari, Daniel and Reuters (2026) “Ebola outbreak in DR Congo could become worst in history, Africa CDC warns,” Al Jazeera, June 16. Lay, Kay (2026) “Aid cuts could cause 22m avoidable deaths by 2030 study finds,” The Guardian, February 3. Locke, Susannah (2014) “The deadliest Ebola outbreak in history is happening right now,” Vox, June 26. Mackenzie, Deoray (2020) COVID-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One, the Bridge Street Press. Mills, David (2026) “Measles, Whooping Cough Rising Due to Low Vaccination Rates, Doctors Say,” healthline, June 4. Mullin, Emily (2026a) “These Researchers Would Be in Africa Fighting Ebola—but Trump Cut Their Funding,” Wired, May 28. _____ (2026b) “Measles Is Becoming So Common That Treatments May Soon Be Needed,” Wired, July 27. Orrico, Anthony (2026) “A Horrific Parasite Is Back — And Elon Musk’s DOGE Could Be Partly to Blame,” Huffington Post, June 5. Paul, Ian Alan (2020) “ten premises for a pandemic,” ianalanpaul.com Reuters (2026) “DRC’s Ebola outbreak may be worst ever, Africa CDC says,” CNN, June 17. Seboual, Lilia (2026) “Musk passed ‘slow death sentence’ on HIV patients by cutting US spending, says head of UNAIDS,” The Telegraph, July 27. Shah, Sonia (2026) “A disease of deforestation: how Ebola is linked to the smartphone in your pocket,” The Guardian, June 5. Thor, Tomas (2026) “Trump Health Cuts Spark Concerns Over “Flesh Eating’ Bacteria,” The Beast, July 2. Thrasher, Steven W. (2022) The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, Celedon. UNAIDS (2026) “About the Impact of US funding cuts on the global HIV response,” UN, February 6. Van Duyse, Don (2026) “Ebola Weaponized: Or How OMB And The World’s Richest Man Are Breaking the World’s Poorest Countries,” Daily Kos, June 13. Weaver, Jane, Jiachuan Wu and Javier Zarracina (2025) “Tracking the 20205 Ebola outbreak,” NBC News, June 2. Williams, Sarah (2026) “Five things to know about hantavirus from a Stanford Medicine expert,” Stanford Medicine News Center, May 22. Yarrow, Grace and Marcia Brown (2026) “Trump administration to resume cattle imports on southern US border amid parasite outbreak,” Politico, July 24. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/5/800080117/community/an-epidemic-of-epidemics/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/