You Won’t Believe How Big Trump’s Pandemic Preparedness Team Is

Donald Trump’s administration only has one person working in its office of pandemic preparedness, and—you guessed it—she’s a vaccine skeptic.

The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy had been empty since last summer, after all the Biden-era employees left and its head resigned. Now the office charged with coordinating cross-agency responses to pandemic risks has only one employee: Sara Brenner, a vaccine skeptic and self-described “MAHA mom.”

“That is a start, but it is not nearly enough,” a former White House official told NOTUS Monday. “You can’t run an Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy as an army of one.”

Brenner joined the Food and Drug Administration in 2019 as a midlevel scientist and was promoted to deputy commissioner after Trump’s inauguration in 2025—where she fully embraced Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ridiculous Make America Healthy Again movement. Brenner was appointed to the OPPR in July amid mounting concerns about global disease outbreaks.

Brenner has a history of publicly airing her concerns about vaccines, The New York Times reported. Speaking at a Make America Healthy Again event last year, she said she chose not to receive the Covid-19 vaccine when she was pregnant during the pandemic because she was concerned about the vaccine’s “biodistribution patterns.”

In May 2025, she co-wrote a memo saying there was no “no clear evidence” that the benefits of Covid vaccines for children under 18 outweighed the risk of harm, overlooking the hundreds of studies that suggested the exact opposite. In March 2025, she intervened in the FDA’s review of the Novavax’s Covid vaccine.

Another health official, Rachel Idowu, was appointed to the National Security Council as its director of bioresponse. Together with Brenner, she will manage the country’s response to pandemic threats.

One health official who spoke to NOTUS praised Idowu’s work, saying she was “truly the right person to have in that office. She can do the work of two or three.” Still, they said Idowu and Brenner would have to be “very selective in terms of what they prioritize.”

Byron Cohen, a former adviser to OPPR, told NOTUS that Idowu and Brenner were two “very experienced, capable people,” but there was still a “tremendous amount of work to be done.”

“Those two individuals only have so much time in the day, and they deserve a full staff to help them carry out their mission,” Cohen told NOTUS.

Clearly, the Trump administration is not prioritizing pandemic preparedness even as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is shaping up to be the worst on record. ...