Since taking office, the Trump administration has accelerated this assault into the most concentrated attack on scientific and public health infrastructure in US history. More than 20,000 workers have been fired across the Department of Health and Human Services since February. The National Institutes of Health budget has been cut from $47 billion to $27 billion. The STOP Spillover program, established to monitor zoonotic threats of which the Hondius cluster is a textbook example, was eliminated by executive order. The CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the sole US public health institution oriented to cruise ships, was eliminated in April. The United States withdrew from the WHO in January, severing the formal International Health Regulations (IHR) notification channels for outbreaks of exactly this kind. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine quack installed at HHS to wage open war on modern medicine, recently declared that COVID only kills sick people.

The same fascistic war on science is unfolding internationally—Milei in Argentina, where this hantavirus emerged and where CONICET has been gutted; Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany. None of this began with Trump’s second term. The Democratic Party, the Labour government in Britain, and social democratic parties across Europe have been junior partners in the assault on public health for six years.

What must be done now? In every workplace, school, hospital, port and ship, the working class must act independently and raise the following demands:

* Immediate PCR and serology testing of every passenger, crew member, Saint Helena disembarkee and flight contact, with full public release of genomic sequencing.
* Educators, healthcare workers and transit workers must demand the safe deployment of HEPA filtration and Far-UVC (222 nm) air disinfection in every indoor public space.
* Every layoff at the CDC, NIH and HHS must be reversed; cruise inspection, zoonotic surveillance and pandemic preparedness must be restored on an emergency basis.
* The criminal “let it rip” policy must be ended, and the elimination of COVID-19, influenza and other airborne pathogens taken up as the demand of the working class against the ruling class that has refused it.
* Emergency action on climate change must be imposed against the financial oligarchy whose investments are driving accelerating zoonotic spillover.

This is not a call for panic. It is a call for the public to know what is happening, and for the working class to act on what its governments will not. Whether the Hondius cluster becomes the next pandemic cannot yet be known. What is certain is that the ruling class has demonstrated, over six years and counting, that it is structurally incapable of preventing pandemics, of arresting climate change which is increasing the threat of zoonotic spillover events, or of protecting the working class from the consequences of either.

The MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak and the threat of another pandemic