Can the FIFA World Cup Survive a Sick USA?
In three weeks, four billion people will tune in to watch the largest sporting event in the world unfold across Mexico, Canada and the USA. There is a lot of talk about the safety of attendees in one of the countries, and the concern is a serious one.
The USA is a country that has spent the preceding year systematically dismantling its ability to detect, prevent, or contain communicable diseases, while simultaneously increasing state violence. Seventy-eight of the 104 matches will be played on American soil. The visiting delegations, the travelling supporters, the broadcast crews, the volunteers, the stadium workers, all of them will be moving through a public health landscape shaped by an anti-health regime leading a country that no longer resembles the one FIFA was promised when the tournament was awarded in 2018.
Football fans of the world are waiting for the opening ceremony, but scientists, journalists and politicians around the world are tracking the health and safety issues of a country that has given up on them:
Measles
Measles was thought to be eliminated in the year 2000, that was hopeful. The disease is now on the rise in the USA, as of May 14, 2026, 1,893 confirmed measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026, on pace to exceed 2025’s 2,281 — the highest count in three decades. The U.S. will likely lose its measles-free status, which it has held since 2000, when officials assess the data in November, following Canada, the United Kingdom and five other European countries that lost theirs earlier this year.
The vaccine is 97% effective. Vaccines in the USA are being used less, thanks to the widespread sharing of conspiracy and misinformation, most of which became rampant in during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of this misinformation is helped by the U.S. ruling regime, who has as their Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who is a long-time conspiracy theorist, and championed an anti-vaccine movement underneath him. Since being made Health Secretary in the USA, Kennedy has shown he is willing to turn that anti-vaccine voice into a range of statements, decisions and policies, including:
Fired the entire CDC vaccine advisory board and replaced them with vaccine skeptics
Stopped or reduced government campaigns encouraging people to get vaccinated
Repeatedly questioned vaccine safety publicly
Continued pushing claims linked to the debunked vaccine-autism theory
Removed or tried to remove CDC language saying vaccines do not cause autism
Appointed people with anti-vaccine backgrounds to health positions
Accused vaccine agencies of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies
Led one of America’s biggest anti-vaccine organizations before entering government
Supported efforts to weaken vaccine mandates and requirements
Ebola
On May 15, 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo confirmed its seventeenth Ebola outbreak, five months after the sixteenth one ended. The pathogen is Bundibugyo virus, a species of Ebola for which there is no licensed vaccine and no specific treatment, with case fatality rates in prior outbreaks ranging from 30% to 50%.
By May 18, nearly 500 suspected cases and 116 deaths had been reported, and one infected American had been evacuated to Germany for treatment. The risk of widespread U.S. transmission is low, Ebola is not airborne and requires contact with the body fluids of symptomatic people.
The current U.S. regime has a role to play in the spread of the virus. USAID's DRC mission was shuttered last year after Trump shuttered USAID. The CDC has been battered by funding and staffing cuts over the preceding eighteen months. The architecture that catches a filovirus early is built upstream, in the country of origin, before it finds the people who travel for a living, and that architecture, for the past eighteen months, has been the explicit target of cuts. Former CDC director Tom Frieden has called the dismantlement of USAID, the withdrawal from the WHO, and the deep cuts to CDC staff a "1-2-3 punch to global health architecture."
Hantavirus
On May 2, 2026, the WHO was notified of a cluster of severe respiratory illness aboard the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged expedition cruise ship returning from Antarctica and the remote South Atlantic. Of 147 passengers and crew, ten cases have been confirmed and three have died. The pathogen is Andes virus, the only hantavirus known to spread person-to-person, and only then through close, prolonged contact with a symptomatic person. The CDC’s assessment is that the overall risk to the American public is extremely low. We include it this on the list largely because of the ongoing news coverage. Health experts agree that there is little risk to the wider public from the spread of this strain, however, the media have been treating it as a larger risk.
Pertussis
More commonly known as whooping cough. In 2025, there were nearly 36,000 pertussis cases, and about 28,000 cases in 2024, both exceeding pre-pandemic averages. Texas its highest count in over a decade. Babies account for 96% of whooping cough-related deaths, they can’t be vaccinated early enough to protect themselves and depend on the immunity of the adults around them, which is collapsing. Falling vaccination rates, waning immunity and slower public health tracking systems, the diagnostic triad of a country that has decided counting is optional.
Syphilis
A disease nearly eradicated in the United States in the 1990s, now at levels not seen since 1950. Congenital syphilis, passed from parent to newborn, is the angle that should be impossible to look away from, and is. The federal response, as of the FY 2026 budget, is to eliminate $43 million in dedicated funding for hepatitis prevention at the CDC and instead propose a $300 million block grant to states that would also include STD and tuberculosis prevention, a net cut to available funds, no matter how they phrase it. Mississippi, the state with the highest STI rates in the country, has already lost the CDC funding that paid for the laboratory work to detect syphilis in patients’ blood.
HIV
The Fiscal Year 2026 budget released by the Trump administration eliminates HIV prevention and surveillance at the CDC, housing, and other programs, amounting to cuts of over $1.5 billion. The CDC has provided more than 90% of all federal HIV prevention funding for decades, about $1 billion a year. That money is gone, or going. Cuts to HIV prevention funding at the CDC would disrupt programs within each state, which rely on federal funding to carry out critical services. This can be expected to trigger a dramatic rise in HIV, STIs, and tuberculosis cases, reversing decades of progress. The first Trump administration set a goal of ending the American HIV epidemic by 2030. The second has decided, instead, to help its spread.
H5N1
Bird flu. A(H5) bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows with sporadic human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers. The virus has, against every prior expectation, established itself in American dairy cattle, a large proportion of consumer milk in the US at any given time contains genetic material from these highly pathogenic viruses.
Pasteurisation kills the virus, what doesn’t is the raw milk that is increasingly consumed in the USA. The current Secretary of Health and Human Services is a raw milk enthusiast. As a disease of wild animals, it’s completely out of control. It’s raging around the world, and there’s no feasible containment method other than just watching it infect huge populations of animals. The federal surveillance apparatus that would catch the moment H5N1 acquires sustained human-to-human transmission has been pared back, not scaled up. The sudden influx of millions of people into the USA couldn’t come at a worse time for those tracking it.
The Regime
Symptoms include the dismantling of the childhood vaccine schedule on January 5, 2026, reducing the universally recommended vaccines from 17 to 11; the firing of the FDA’s top vaccine official for, in his own words, refusing to provide “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies”; the elimination of the CDC’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy; and the order, in March 2025, banning the CDC from reporting measles risk in areas with low vaccination rates.
Transmission is airborne, via Truth Social, cable news, and the willing repetition of state officials and federal appointees. The vulnerable population is everyone in the country and, soon, everyone arriving in it. We have a word for what happens when a government dismantles the public health infrastructure of the country it governs in the weeks before that country hosts the world. We have several. None of them are flattering, and nor should you expect them to be.
This is the body FIFA is delivering its tournament to. A country in active retreat from its own public health, broadcasting that retreat as a political achievement, in the weeks before four billion people arrive — in person or by screen — to watch it perform. The diseases listed above are not the question. They are the evidence. The question is whether FIFA, the visiting federations, the broadcast partners, and the assembled press corps will spend the summer of 2026 pretending they cannot see what every epidemiologist in the country is now saying out loud: that the United States has been made sick on purpose, that the sickness is the policy, and that the spectacle is what the policy is for.
The World Cup will arrive. The question is what it leaves behind.