Guess What Happens Next When There's a Deadly E. coli Outbreak in the New Trump Era

The New American Golden Age is something of a crapshoot—in every sense of the word, including the literal. From NBC News:

An E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce ripped across 15 states in November, sickening dozens of people, including a 9-year-old boy in Indiana who nearly died of kidney failure and a 57-year-old Missouri woman who fell ill after attending a funeral lunch. One person died.

That sounds bad.

The Food and Drug Administration indicated in February that it had closed the investigation without publicly detailing what had happened — or which companies were responsible for growing and processing the contaminated lettuce. According to an internal report obtained by NBC News, the FDA did not name the companies because no contaminated lettuce was left by the time investigators uncovered where the pathogen was coming from. “There were no public communications related to this outbreak,” the FDA said in its report, which noted that there had been a death but provided no details about it.

That sounds worse.

This particular president has a long and distinguished record, dating back to his bungled response to the pandemic, of hiding any information that makes him look like less than the Lord Of The Universe. Now, with Elon The Breeder clear-cutting the federal agencies, there's going to be a lot less to cover up because there will be a lot less discovered.

There once were legitimate reasons for the FDA to keep outbreaks quiet, particularly during that space of time when the source of the outbreak is uncertain. But, over the last few years, the FDA narrowed the criteria for withholding information from the public in favor of greater transparency.

The FDA had shifted in recent years...in the wake of large-scale outbreaks and heightened public concern about contaminated food, said Frank Yiannas, the former deputy commissioner of food policy and response at the agency. “It is disturbing that FDA hasn’t said anything more public or identified the name of a grower or processor,” said Yiannas, who was at the FDA from 2018 to 2023. By declining to name the culprit, he said, the FDA was withholding critical information that consumers could use to make decisions about what they buy. It’s also possible that someone could have been sickened during the outbreak and not have realized the cause, and serious bacterial illness can cause long-term damage.

Then, the DOGE and pony show came to town, and any reasoned discussion about how and when to inform the public became moot because there was nobody left to do the job anyway.

Much of the staff responsible for developing and distributing information to the public about foodborne illnesses was terminated this month as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to shrink the federal government. “We no longer have all the mechanisms in place to learn from those situations and prevent the next outbreak from happening,” said Taryn Webb, who led the FDA’s public engagement division for human foods until she was laid off during the mass firing this month. And the administration has separately moved to delay a new federal rule requiring food companies and grocery stores to rapidly track down contaminated food and pull it off the shelves, though the FDA said the delay was meant to give time to ensure better compliance.

What you don't know can't hurt you. It can kill you, but that's a whole different thing.