The foreign aid freeze, destruction of USAID, and withdrawal from the World Health Organization have severely undermined America’s ability to fight infectious diseases at home and abroad. With outbreaks of the deadly Marburg and Ebola viruses underway in East Africa and a fast-mutating bird flu spreading across the world, these moves by the Trump administration have left Americans highly vulnerable.

I’m joined in today’s live chat by Dr. Emily Smith, an epidemiologist at Duke University. She is a fellow Substacker who runs Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist and is the author of the book The Science of the Good Samaritan: Thinking Bigger about Loving our Neighbors. We kick off with something of a global tour of concerning infectious diseases before having a wide-ranging conversation about how recent moves by the Trump administration have incapacitated our system of disease surveillance and pandemic defense.