Five years after a novel virus rocked the world, killed millions, and continues to sicken people, amidst ongoing outbreaks of bird flu and mpox and tuberculosis , public health and scientific research are being gutted in America—and it’s happening more quickly than even experts thought possible. “This is less than a week into it all,” Saskia Popescu, assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me over the weekend. As millions wait to