In May 2026, posts on social media sites including Instagram, Reddit and X claimed that in 2025, under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired all its cruise ship inspectors, part of the agency's Vessel Sanitation Program.
The claim spread in the wake of an April 2026 outbreak of Andes-strain hantavirus on the MV Hondius, a Dutch cruise ship. The Andes strain is the only type of hantavirus — a family of viruses carried by rodents and spread to humans through their droppings, urine and saliva — where some direct human-to-human transmission has been documented. Users sharing the claim implied that the CDC's cuts had led to the 2026 outbreak.
Snopes readers also wrote in looking for more information about the claim.
Although 2025 reporting from CBS News documented that the CDC did lay off all its full-time cruise ship inspectors, and there was no information suggesting that report was false or misleading, Snopes was unable to independently confirm the reporting; therefore we haven't applied a fact-check rating.
In order to rate the claim in lieu of confirmation from the involved agencies, we would need to obtain a list of the CDC's cruise ship inspectors pre-2025, then either obtain a list of fired employees or speak to some of those inspectors directly and verify their information.
We contacted the CDC and the Vessel Sanitation Program for comment on the allegations and await a response from the VSP.
A CDC spokesperson said via email that the Vessel Sanitation Program was "fully staffed, including epidemiologists, and continues to carry out all core program activities for cruise ships under U.S. jurisdiction." Because it was unclear exactly what the agency meant by "fully staffed," Snopes asked it to clarify how many employees were involved with the program and will update this report if we receive a response.
According to the CDC's website, the Vessel Sanitation Program "helps the cruise industry prevent and control public health issues," by inspecting cruise ships, monitoring illnesses and outbreaks, reviewing ship designs for public health standards, training cruise ship staff on public health practices and publishing case reports.
The program is not funded by taxpayers, according to its website. Instead, cruise ship operators pay an inspection fee based on the ship's size, and ships must be inspected twice a year. (As a result, Kennedy's decision to cut the program "baffled CDC officials," according to CBS News.)
But assuming CBS News' reporting about the layoffs was accurate (again, there was no indication otherwise), the idea that CDC layoffs directly caused the outbreak on the Hondius was misleading.
That's for two reasons: First, according to the VSP's inspection database, the CDC has never inspected the MV Hondius. Second, the vessel had not recently docked at a U.S. port, where such an inspection would happen.
The Andes strain of hantavirus is native to South America, particularly Argentina and Chile, according to the World Health Organization. The first death on the Hondius came less than two weeks after it left Ushuaia, Argentina.
The ship stopped at a few remote islands in the South Atlantic, then St. Helena (where least one infected passenger disembarked), then headed north toward the island nation of Cape Verde and finally to the Canary Islands, from where remaining passengers were repatriated to their home countries.
According to the New York Times, the ship had very strict biosecurity standards, such as employing sniffer dogs at ports and requiring passengers to wear sanitized rubber boots during wildlife excursions on remote islands.