Dan Dinello Informed Comment
Compromising the safety of America’s food supply, the consequences of RFK’s disembowelment of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Food Safety Infrastructure can be heard in the groans emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country.
In only eighteen months, Kennedy — along with the corrupt mobster president and his parasitic accomplice Elon Musk — turned a seasonal stomach bug into the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history.
Cyclospora, the foodborne parasite, has infected more than 22,000 Americans so far this summer — about a 95% increase in the typical number of U.S. cases (1,000). The infection is almost always the result of ingesting food or water contaminated with human feces containing cyclospora parasites. The ingested parasites unleash a brutal invasion of the small intestine that causes nausea, cramping, and what has been described as “watery diarrhea,” “relentless diarrhea,” and, most vividly, “explosive diarrhea.” Usually not life-threatening, the miserable symptoms of cyclosporiasis may persist for a month and even relapse.
The outbreaks are almost always caused by improper sanitation at farms or food processing facilities.
The American food safety infrastructure has been gutted by a three-headed monster named Kennedy, Musk and Trump. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) was eradicated in early 2025 as result of an executive order by Trump. NACMCF provided reliable scientific advice and coordinated prevention strategies for defending against malignant microbes. As you might expect, just before the committee was terminated, it was doing its job and working on safety recommendations regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.
FDA’s food safety inspections have been suspended under Kennedy’s mismanagement, having lost more than 4,000 employees. FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after more than 80 of his workers were sacked. Ravaged by Kennedy, deep staff cuts to the FDA not only mean no food inspectors, but a loss of institutional knowledge and delays in lab work.
Answering to no one, Musk — through his perversely misnamed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — wreaked havoc on food safety as more than 20,000 workers were forced from USDA last year.
The damage to American public-health infrastructure, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease epidemics like this one, has been equally devastating. Since taking office, Kennedy has waged a deranged assault against the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) culminating in his decision to decapitate the CDC by firing Dr. Susan Monarez as director and eliminating nearly 3,000 science staff.
The decimation of the national public-health apparatus has had a direct impact on the cyclosporiasis crisis. The CDC’s parasite-surveillance team, which was instrumental in tracing the origin of the 2013 cyclospora outbreak, had eleven scientists before the systematic dismantling by Kennedy and DOGE. Now it has three.
Until last year, the FoodNet program, a joint project of the CDC, FDA, and USDA, mandated proactive surveillance of eight pathogens, including cyclospora. Kennedy directed Foodnet to cut six out of eight pathogens, including . . . wait for it . . . the diarrhea pathogen cyclospora. No, I’m not kidding.
Sabotaged by RFK, the CDC‘s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which trains and deploys “disease detectives” to trace and respond to outbreaks was also crippled, losing scores of personnel.
“The people who are still at CDC are working under incredibly constrained circumstances,” said former disease detective Arthur Reingold, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California “We have a markedly reduced capacity to do the kinds of studies that underpin prevention-and-control strategies.”
The growing cyclospora epidemic has hit Michigan the hardest. The Michigan Department of Health counted 12,218 cases, 193 hospitalizations and recorded its first two related deaths last week. Cyclospora has erupted as an issue in the campaign for Senate.
“We DOGE-d away protection against explosive diarrhea,” said Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, former Columbia University Professor of Epidemiology and former Director of the Detroit Health Department. With scatological humor, he added, “I’m on the anti-explosive diarrhea side of things.” El-Sayed accused his Republican opponent Mike Rodgers of being “pro-explosive diarrhea” for supporting the government that fouled us with the outbreak.
The dramatic deluge of cases, with more than 740 hospitalizations across 47 states, has led a majority of American voters to say they have little or no confidence in government oversight of food safety, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll. With all this in mind, it makes sense that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently spent nearly three hours grilling a health official over his response to a disease outbreak.
Absurdly, the disease outbreak focus was COVID-19 and the health official was retired National Institutes of Health immunologist Anthony Fauci, more than three years removed from federal service. Pathologically obsessed with Fauci, committee chairperson Sen. Rand Paul has said he wants the 85-year-old scientist “behind bars.”
The MAGA-led Senate committee attempted to humiliate Fauci, trap him into perjuring himself, and then voted – along party lines – to hold him in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer their hostile questions, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.
Fauci became the public face of the COVID pandemic response — calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. The country turned him into a folk hero. Fauci refused to live in the Trump Twilight Zone and called out those who did. Putting a target on his back, Republicans accuse Fauci of doing what Trump did: lying to cover-up his responsibility for thousands of deaths. As most everyone remembers, Trump completely botched his response to containing COVID. According to a study published in The Lancet, the Trump Administration’s undermining of science and public health agencies directly “impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”
Paul and Republicans pursued a man who led the NIH for 38 years and whose work has saved countless lives. He frequently treated diseases, like Ebola, that kill the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. A key architect of PEPFAR, Fauci launched the emergency HIV/AIDS plan in 2003 that provided funds and medical resources to combat the global AIDS epidemic. Estimates show PEPFAR saved more than 25 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Musk’s DOGE terminated USAID, thereby freezing all payments and services for PEPFAR despite its being a permanent part of U.S. law. Yet Fauci is the one Republicans defame, vilify and are determined to destroy. Instead of Fauci, they might have questioned Musk about the deaths he caused by terminating USAID. Americans also have a right to know how much he and DOGE contributed to the cyclospora outbreak: how his brand of “efficiency” has hollowed out federal, state, and local health departments charged with inspecting food facilities and monitoring microbial threats. Fauci serves as a distraction from the ongoing public health failures of Musk, Kennedy and Trump.
Instead of Fauci, they might have grilled the Kennedy-appointed acting commissioner of the FDA Kyle Diamantas about the FDA’s delay in implementing the federal Food Traceability Rule. With a compliance date set for January 2026, the Rule might have prevented thousands of Americans from spending much of the summer on the toilet. Once in place, it would promote greater traceability in the food system and facilitate solving foodborne outbreaks. After lobbying by the Grocery Store Industry, the FDA extended the compliance date 30 months from January 2026.
Food industry watchdog group Consumer Reports condemned this extension, saying, “This decision puts consumers at risk of getting sick from unsafe food because a small segment of the industry pushed for delay, despite having 15 years to prepare.” The diarrhea epidemic might have been contained but for the delay.
Instead of persecuting Fauci, the Committee should have put Taylor Farms CEO Bruce Taylor on the hot seat as the man who put thousands of Americans on the toilet seat. Taylor Farms’ surreptitious handling of this ongoing outbreak is deserving of microscopic inquiry. The company was implicated in numerous food recalls and food-borne illnesses, including a cyclosporiasis outbreak in 2013 and an E. coli outbreak in 2024.
The FDA named Taylor Farms lettuce as the likely source of the outbreak on July 17, 2026. Its first clear actionable statement on cyclosporiasis was peculiar in its specificity. It described a “multistate outbreak of cyclospora infections linked to Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in 5 states.” Its advice to consumers was overly narrow: “Do not eat shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia.” The lettuce came from an unnamed “single supplier” in Mexico. “Shredded iceberg lettuce sold in grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not affected.”
Prudently going beyond the FDA recommendations, Taco Bell’s official statement encouraged “all relevant restaurants, retailers, and foodservice operators”— not just Taco Bells in the five states that the government had identified — to act responsibly, by pulling lettuce off their menu.
Taylor Farms’ initial recall included lettuce shipped not just to Taco Bell, but also to a number of major companies including Sysco, the largest wholesale food distributor in the U.S., supplying restaurants, hospitals, and schools. Taylor Farms’ lettuce, like microplastics and mycotoxins, is everywhere in our food system.
Suddenly upset that it was being targeted for the outbreak, Taylor Farms executives, who made a million-dollar donation to MAGA Inc — a pro-Trump superpac, met with White House officials. They tried to distance the company from the outbreak and voice concerns about the official investigations.
Two days later, Kennedy’s chaotic FDA reversed course announcing a false positive test on Taylor Farms lettuce which made things even more confusing. The embarrassing mistake was compounded by Taylor Farms, which issued a statement that began with: “Today, FDA apologized to us.” The FDA denied that it had issued a formal apology.
All of this confusion should be investigated by Rand Paul and his gang of witch-hunters. Instead they attacked Fauci while Taylor Farms’ CEO Bruce Taylor rests easy even as Americans get violently sick: a grim reminder of the privileges that political donations have secured under gangster Trump.
Rand Paul’s inquisitors, who want burn Fauci at the stake, might have also subpoenaed DHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, the gold-standard superspreader of misinformation. But what has characterized his agency’s response to the cyclospora outbreak is the absence of information. That owes partly to an absence of personnel and direction. Neither the FDA nor the office of the Surgeon General currently has a Senate-confirmed leader. Kennedy himself was silent for weeks.
f.j.zirbel, “Enemy of Science”
The governmental outbreak response “is starting to approach a catastrophic level in terms of how mismanaged it’s been on multiple fronts,” said former FDA deputy commissioner and Trump’s former top food safety official Frank Yiannas. He called for an independent investigation of the CDC, FDA and Kennedy.
Kennedy has made only one public comment about the diarrhea epidemic. Weeks ago, Kennedy claimed the cyclosporiasis outbreak was “under control” — it’s not. He also asserted that DOGE cutbacks to food safety programs are not to blame — they are. His statements contradicted his own staff at the FDA who announced it is “investigating yet another outbreak of the diarrhea-causing cyclospora parasite, with 72 cases tied to an unknown source.”
“It’s hard to know what ‘under control’ means when there are so many mixed messages about what food products are involved and why people are getting sick,” said Sandra Eskin, the CEO of the Chicago-based nonprofit Stop Foodborne Illness.
If history is any judge, when the Trump administration declares a crisis under control, it’s time to brace for the worst yet to come. In typical fashion, RFK like Trump pats himself on the back for a job not done. We are also in the midst of the biggest measles outbreak since … oh wait, that’s the other health-related disaster Kennedy doesn’t want to talk about because it is, in part, caused by him personally, through his years-long history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation.
Under Kennedy’s malign anti-vax influence, the gullible Trump, on Monday, disgorged an executive order foolishly and recklessly limiting vaccines because of “what some people say.” The President even stupidly repeated the thoroughly debunked claim linking autism and childhood vaccines, again undermining science and public health.
Kennedy lies about everything. Entrusted with our health, he and his agency cannot be trusted to perform the basic role of government safety: monitoring our food for parasitic pathogens, issuing timely recalls, informing us of risks, providing guidance on how to avoid those risks, and offering the best medical counsel about what to do if we become ill. Instead, he created a summer shit show.
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