Bird Flu, Measles, and Trump’s Ticking Time Bomb

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared.
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera talks with host Al Letson about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and our developing public health emergencies, including the spread of bird flu and the ongoing measles outbreaks. We’ve not only failed to learn our lessons from the pandemic, she argues, but we also might be stumbling into the next one.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We are seeing this disease spread in a way that we probably don't have a good handle on exactly how much it's spreading.
0:10.7	It's very reminiscent to the conversations we had about COVID-19 and how it seems almost undetected because we're not testing enough.
0:17.7	We're not testing enough. We're not testing enough.
0:19.3	I feel like I've never said a sentence more in my life than we're not testing enough. We're not testing enough. We're not testing enough. I feel like I've never said a sentence more in my life than we're not testing enough.
0:27.0	Coming up on more to the story, I talk with epidemiologist Jessica Malati Rivera about the likelihood
0:33.4	that we could be stumbling into another pandemic, at the same time that the Trump administration
0:39.3	is dismantling and reshaping the very agencies responsible for keeping us safe.
0:49.3	Hey, it's Al, and since 2015, Reveal has been delivering powerful investigative journalism
1:01.2	that you won't hear anywhere else. But with public media under attack, there's no guarantee
1:07.2	of another 10 years. We need you to help keep us strong. Please donate today. Just
1:14.5	visit reveal news.org slash 10. Again, that's reveal news.org slash 10. And thank you. This is more to the story.
1:32.1	I'm Al Letson.
1:33.4	This month marks the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I got to tell you,
1:39.5	it feels like we didn't learn our lesson.
1:42.1	I can't help but get a little anxious when I hear all the
1:44.9	stories in the news these days about the threats to our health. There's a bird flu and measles
1:50.0	and an unknown disease in Congo. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the new health secretary still questions the
1:57.5	use of vaccines. It all seems to be colliding at once. So I brought in Jessica
2:02.5	Malati Rivera, a health and science expert to help me make sense of it all. She spent the last
2:08.2	15 years studying emerging infectious diseases and regularly speaks about public health.
2:14.6	Jessica, how you doing? Hi, Elle. I'm okay. How are you?
2:18.2	I'm good now that I'm talking to you.
	...

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