The Screwworm Is the Cost of RFK Jr. All But Killing Public Health

Once eliminated in the U.S., the screwworm's return is a menacing reminder of the cost of an anti-science agenda.

By Jeff Nesbit

A pound of ground beef now averages a staggering $7.06 at the supermarket. Various critics point to several root causes, such as years of relentless, climate-driven drought across the American West or the fact that the U.S. cattle herd is now at a 75-year low.

But to really understand the most alarming driver of persistent food inflation in America right now, you have to look somewhere else entirely — specifically, under the skin of a newborn calf in Texas and inside the depleted hallways of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Photo by Kylee Alons on Unsplash

The New World screwworm is back. For the first time in decades, this devastating biological parasite has been detected in domestic livestock in Texas and a dog in New Mexico.

It’s a stomach-turning development. A fly lays its eggs in open wounds. The hatched maggots literally eat the living tissue of warm-blooded animals from the inside out. If left untreated, it’s routinely fatal.

To be clear, this isn’t a food safety crisis (at least not yet). Cooked beef remains perfectly safe to eat. But to the pocketbook of the typical American consumer, the return of the screwworm is a slow-burning catastrophe.

Ranchers trying to rebuild America’s depleted herds face a nightmare scenario. The parasite aggressively targets vulnerable young calves and mothers.

To stop the spread, states are beginning to make decisions based on public health imperatives and economic considerations.

Oklahoma, Missouri, California, and Georgia are imposing strict livestock permitting requirements. Meanwhile, the United States has slammed the border shut on live cattle imports from Mexico, which traditionally supplies a million head of cattle a year to domestic markets.

We’re not looking at a sudden, temporary price spike like the avian flu-induced egg shortage of recent years. Instead, agricultural economists are warning of a permanent baseline shift. The screwworm introduces a systemic drag on the supply chain, guaranteeing that record-high beef prices could very well remain for the foreseeable future.

The frontline defense against this ecological invasion belongs to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is scrambling to deploy billions of sterile flies to break the insect’s reproductive cycle.

But a crisis of this biological magnitude can’t be fought in a vacuum. It requires a seamless, aggressive, holistic public health framework in which animal health, human health, and national biosecurity are treated as a single, interconnected shield.

Right now, the shield is cracking.

As the parasite spreads, the CDC has officially activated a Level 3 emergency response to monitor the outbreak and coordinate with local health departments. In normal times, this would be a reassuring sign of bureaucratic vigilance. Today, it feels more like a skeleton crew trying to patch a leaking dam with chewing gum

The CDC is a house in deep disarray. The agency’s leadership is fractured.

An interim director is splitting his time running both the National Institutes of Health and the CDC simultaneously. More damning, the agency is suffering from a catastrophic institutional brain drain.

Over the past year, a staggering 25 percent of the CDC’s workforce — nearly 3,000 career scientists, researchers, and field experts — left the payroll, driven out by successive rounds of deep reductions in force and collapsing internal morale.

The Trump administration has spent the past year treating public health infrastructure like an easy target for cost-cutting and political theater.

But when you hollow out a scientific agency under the guise of slashing red tape or bureaucracy, you don’t just eliminate paperwork. You eliminate the specialized human wall required to keep global pathogens and parasites out of American communities.

Now, the CDC’s depleted staff is being pushed to the absolute brink. It’s simultaneously managing a lethal Ebola outbreak in Central Africa and a rare, fatal Hantavirus crisis on a cruise ship. Activating an emergency response for the screwworm, even at its lowest tier, adds severe strain to an agency already running on fumes.

The lesson of the screwworm is a visceral reminder that institutional incompetence carries a steep taxpayer premium. Whether you believe in big government or small government, nobody votes for a government so fundamentally broken that it cannot protect the domestic food supply from a flesh-eating maggot.

When our public health agencies are mismanaged, understaffed, and structurally chaotic, the consequences don’t stay confined to conference rooms and offices in Washington, D.C.

They travel down the supply chain. They cross quarantine lines. And then, inevitably, they make their way onto the American dinner table.

Every time you look at the receipt at the grocery checkout line, you’re looking at the literal cost of a fraying government and depleted federal public health expertise. And we’re all paying the cost now.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS in the Biden-Harris administration.

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