Medieval diseases are back in Los Angeles. Not as a metaphor. As a documented public health reality that LA County’s own internal documents confirm the city is powerless to stop.
Christopher Rufo obtained 1,000 pages of County Health Department records through FOIA requests. The picture they paint should be required reading for every voter in California: typhus is back. Hantavirus is spreading. The county’s own officials acknowledged in those documents that the “increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond.”
LA County recorded 220 typhus cases in 2025 — the highest total on record. Three people have died.
Rufo’s diagnosis of the cause is precise and devastating. The homeless encampments scattered across Los Angeles — not just Skid Row but throughout the city — have become perfect breeding grounds for rats. Millions of them. Breeding under the streets, inside the encampments, and spreading flea-borne disease to anyone in proximity.
And then there’s the Newsom factor. In two separate pieces of legislation, Gavin Newsom banned the most effective rodenticides available — the rat poisons that actually work to keep urban rodent populations under control. Not because there was a better alternative. Not because the rodents were going to politely cooperate with less effective control methods. Because the environmental lobby demanded it.
The result, as Rufo put it: “When you put those ingredients together, you get something that experts predicted in LA seems powerless to stop.”
This is what progressive governance actually produces when it collides with the laws of nature. The left can promise every form of compassionate social policy, but rats don’t read policy papers, flea-borne typhus doesn’t respect good intentions, and the people dying in LA’s homeless encampments are dying under an administration that banned the tools that could have controlled the disease vector.
The homeless encampments remain because LA Democrats have decided clearing them is inhumane. The trash and human waste accumulating around those encampments remains because workers who complain are ignored. The rats breed because the most effective poisons are banned. The typhus spreads because the health department doesn’t have the resources or the political support to respond at scale.
Every link in this chain was forged by a deliberate policy choice made by California Democrats. Open the encampments, clear the streets, restore effective rodent control — and typhus retreats. Protect the encampments, ban the rodenticides, underfund the public health response — and typhus spreads to record levels.
Gavin Newsom is running for president on his California record. That record is 220 typhus cases in a single year, three deaths, a County Health Department that admits it’s overwhelmed, and the most effective rat poisons banned by executive fiat.
Before attempting to remake American society, California’s governor should prove he can keep his own city free of diseases that medieval Europeans died from. He hasn’t managed it yet.
