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NEW YORK — <\/span>No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors. <\/p>\n In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak<\/a> that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world<\/a>, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action<\/a>, according to a number of experts.<\/p>\n To President Donald Trump, “We seem to have things under very good control,” as he told reporters Friday evening.<\/p>\n To experts, the situation<\/a> aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week. <\/p>\n \u201cThe CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. \u201cI’ve never seen that before.\u201d<\/p>\n Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.<\/p>\n Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a University of Nebraska quarantine center for evaluation and monitoring. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert<\/a> to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases. <\/p>\n At their first briefing, held Saturday by telephone only for invited reporters, officials pledged to be transparent in updating the public but said the media could not cite the speakers by name under rules set by aides to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They did not directly answer a question about whether the American passengers could leave the university medical facility when they wanted.<\/p>\n The CDC’s diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.<\/p>\n The hantavirus outbreak is \u201ca sentinel event\u201d that speaks to \u201chow well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I\u2019m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,\u201d said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. <\/p>\n Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man’s wife and a German woman, who both died. <\/p>\n Hantavirus was first identified<\/a> as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.<\/p>\n For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.<\/p>\n Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world’s premier public health agency.<\/p>\n But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think this is a giant threat to the United States,\u201d said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University\u2019s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out \u201cjust shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists<\/a> from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.<\/p>\n The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency’s ship sanitation program.<\/p>\n As this was playing out, Kennedy said he was working<\/a> to \u201crestore the CDC\u2019s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus. <\/p>\n The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is \u201cextremely low,\u201d and described the U.S. government as \u201cthe world\u2019s leader in global health security.\u201d<\/p>\n Said Nuzzo: \u201cNot only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.\u201d<\/p>\n The CDC’s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message<\/a> on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship \u2014 a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious \u2014 had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information. <\/p>\n The CDC also is \u201cmonitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,\u201d Bhattacharya wrote.<\/p>\n But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests. The first on-camera appearance by a CDC official came Saturday morning, when Bhattacharya appeared on a Fox News program and said, “My message to the American people is please don\u2019t worry.\u201d But he got some details wrong and overstated what was known about the outbreak. <\/p>\n He incorrectly said two passengers in their 80s had died after they had contracted the virus while bird-watching in Argentina. The travelers were a 70-year-old Dutch man and his 69-year-old wife and while Argentine health officials think it is possible they were infected during a bird-watching outing, it has not been established<\/a>.<\/p>\n In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.<\/p>\n The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines<\/a>, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports \u201cthat became the world\u2019s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,\u201d said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.<\/p>\n