White House gutted pandemic preparation plans. Then came Ebola
WASHINGTON — In January 2025, with the Covid-19 pandemic still top of mind, the Biden administration left behind extensive plans for how the federal bureaucracy should work to stop future disease outbreaks.
The plans were hundreds of pages long and addressed dozens of specific issues, including the government response to diseases like Ebola and how to move Americans from outbreak zones back to the U.S. for care.
But weeks later, the Trump administration took Washington by storm — and began disregarding the plans, according to two former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who worked in the Trump administration and four people familiar with the Biden-era plans.
This article is exclusive to STAT+ subscribers
Unlock this article — plus daily intelligence on Capitol Hill and the life sciences industry — by subscribing to STAT+.
Already have an account? Log in
View All Plans
To read the rest of this story subscribe to STAT+.
Subscribe
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
