Ask the Mayor: COVID and Schools

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer on Sunday criticized the Trump administration’s cuts to federal public health programs, arguing a deadly hantavirus outbreak tied to an international cruise ship highlights the risks of reducing CDC staffing.

The Senate Minority Leader from New York called on the administration to rehire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cruise ship inspectors and Port Health Station staff laid off during cuts overseen by the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative established during President Donald Trump’s first year in office by billionaire Elon Musk.

In a letter sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Schumer demanded details about the federal response to the outbreak and current CDC staffing levels. He also urged the White House to restore funding for infectious disease research, vaccine programs and viral threat surveillance, and to rejoin the World Health Organization.

"The very CDC inspectors and port health workers we need to track this virus, the people whose entire job is to keep deadly diseases off cruise ships and out of our country, Donald Trump fired them,” Schumer said.

The comments came as passengers aboard the MV Hondius, where an outbreak of the Andes strain of hantavirus has killed three people and sickened at least eight others, started returning to the United States and other countries.

On Friday, the CDC said, “the overall risk to travelers and the American public remains extremely low. Routine travel can continue as normal.” On Sunday, Schumer questioned the agency’s ability to assess the situation after staffing reductions.

“How do they know?” he said. “They have made it impossible to find out. That is not reassurance. That is incompetence.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seven Americans have already returned to the United States after leaving the ship, according to the Associated Press. Two New Jersey residents were being monitored earlier this week after they were potentially exposed to the virus through contact with a passenger from the ship, according to the New Jersey Department of Health.

The remaining American passengers began heading home Sunday morning, according to Schumer’s office.

The Trump administration eliminated the CDC’s full-time Vessel Sanitation Program staff last year, according to previous CBS News reporting. The Associated Press also reported the CDC did not escalate its response to the outbreak until late Friday, drawing criticism from some public health experts.

New York City health officials said Friday they had not been notified that any city residents were aboard the MV Hondius, but said they were monitoring the situation and remained in close communication with the World Health Organization.

State troopers said they issued nearly 1,000 tickets to motorists during a blitz last month intended to bring attention to road worker safety.

Between April 20 and 24, the New York State Police said it conducted 12 enforcement details at a dozen work zones across the state. In some cases, troopers were disguised as highway workers to identify violations.

The state police said it issued 160 tickets for violations of New York’s Move Over Law, which requires drivers to slow down and move over when there is a vehicle parked on the side of the road. This year’s tally is an 84% increase from last year’s blitz.

Speeding tickets made up the bulk of the citations, at 401. Such tickets rose by a third from a year earlier.

According to the state police data, roughly a third of the stops were made along the New York State Thruway.

Maine-based artist and writer Ann Tracy was initially thrilled when she got an email inviting her to be a guest on "The New Yorker Radio Hour," a show and podcast hosted by New Yorker editor David Remnick and co-produced by the magazine and WNYC Studios.

But then she realized the email address didn’t look like it belonged to the organization.

“ I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, how did they figure out little old Ann Tracy,'" she said. “Then my intuition kicked in, and I started looking at the email itself a little more closely, and noticed number one, it was from a Gmail account, not from 'The New Yorker Radio Hour' account, and I thought, ‘hmm.’”

According to WNYC’s in-house data security expert, Kenneth Atkins, Tracy was one of dozens of people, many of them authors, who got similar “phishing” emails — fraudulent messages that aim to steal personal information — from accounts impersonating producers or hosts of different WNYC shows, inviting them to be on-air guests. WNYC is part of New York Public Radio, an organization that includes Gothamist.

“The important thing here is that ultimately they ask the authors to provide either some sort of voluntary contribution or a fixed fee to be on the show to cover the cost of promotion and to cover the cost of production,” Atkins said on WNYC’s "Brian Lehrer Show" last week.

But, as host Brian Lehrer emphasized: “Our interviews and our airtime are never for sale, nor do we collect fees from our guests for logistics, production, or anything else that goes into making the show. We will never ask you to pay to come on.”

New York state’s Division of Consumer Protection has tracked more than 6,000 similar impersonation scam reports in the past 12 months across the five boroughs. The agency didn’t find any complaints specifically mentioning WNYC, but instead found three other similar complaints across the country impersonating other public radio stations.

“They were all filed within the past month, so this may be an emerging scam model,” said Mercedes Padilla, a spokesperson for the division.

Tracy told Gothamist the email she received from the phony account was well written, parroting career highlights such as her “continued engagement with theatre through the SnowLion Repertory Theatre Company’s Play Lab” and “your multidisciplinary creative life, spanning performance, writing, and media” as reasons why she would be a good fit for the show.

“ It was almost too well-written to be a scam. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, it could be real or it could be someone using AI crawling my website, getting the information from that, and then working that with AI into an email,” she said.

Tracy’s hunch could be correct, said Rachel Tobac, CEO of San-Francisco-based SocialProof Security. More scammers are using a tactic called “spear phishing,” a targeted form of cyberattack that uses information about their targets available online to craft personalized, deceptive emails with the goal of extracting personal information or money.

“ They're definitely increasing in believability and scalability because of AI,” Tobac said. “Previously, attackers will have to go and draft a phishing message for each and every individual person. It takes a really long time for the attacker to do that.

But now?

"AI can do all of the research, choose the targets, develop the text message or the email or the phone call, even do a voice clone or a deepfake to sound like somebody that they're not.”