Taken as a whole, these cascading public health crises point to a system that is being bent to the breaking point. On top of that, the Trump administration’s revision of rules for federal grants and increased scrutiny of projects funded by the National Institutes of Health makes it extraordinarily hard for universities and research teams to staff their laboratories. Without a steady stream of grants, “we essentially have to turn the lights off,” Sarah Ewald, associate professor of immunology, microbiology, and cancer biology at the University of Virginia, explained to Truthout. “There’ve just been massive delays in terms of funding for basic research.” As a result, it has become harder for clinicians and researchers to work out the “frequency of disease incidences and whether they’re reaching outbreak levels.”