Public Health Opponents Leverage Hantavirus Outbreak to Spread Conspiracies and Misinformation
Many familiar faces from the COVID-19 pandemic are back.
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
The relatively rare hantavirus entered the mainstream lexicon in recent weeks, with an outbreak linked to a Dutch cruise ship. Thus far, there have been 11 known cases and three deaths.
While the virus has a startling fatality rate of up to 40%, it is relatively rare and typically spreads from contact with the urine, droppings, or saliva of infected rodents. The strain responsible for the cruise ship outbreak, however, known as the Andes virus, can also spread person-to-person.
The discourse online about the virus has ranged from curiosity, to mild concern, to COVID-19 pandemic flashbacks—the SARS-CoV-2 virus also spread on a cruise ship in February 2020. Scientists, however, maintain that hantavirus’ pandemic potential is low because its structure renders it far less transmissible than coronaviruses.
Experts are far more concerned with an emerging Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which the World Health Organization just declared a global health emergency.
Far-right and anti-vaccine groups and influencers have nevertheless capitalized on the hantavirus outbreak to attack the public health mainstream and promote conspiracy theories.
The Brownstone Institute, an anti-public health group founded in 2021 to combat pandemic mitigation efforts, published a piece by its senior scholar Clayton J. Baker, M.D., asking “Is This Hantavirus a Bioweapon” and referring to media coverage of the outbreak as “fear porn.” Baker correctly noted that the virus likely lacks pandemic potential, but also paradoxically suggested it may have been engineered as a bioweapon to boost pharmaceutical profits.
He claimed that the hantavirus has been the subject of “intense” vaccine research, including by groups like Moderna, which created the “toxic” mRNA vaccines for COVID. (COVID vaccines are estimated to have prevented over 14.4 million deaths worldwide and serious adverse reactions remain very rare.) Baker writes that the virus has “also been repeatedly nominated, alongside such other candidates as Bird flu and Monkeypox, as the potential next pandemic-causing ‘Disease X,’” while not citing any reports or individuals who gave him this information.
“Color me skeptical,” Baker wrote. “It’s hardly enough that these passengers happened to have visited Argentina, which happens to harbor the one species of hantavirus that happens to have been ‘implicated in human-to-human transmission’ to suddenly determine that a naturally-occurring, contagious Hantavirus strain is circumnavigating the globe aboard cruise ships.”
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) actually asserts that Hantavirus is not the next “Disease X’ and that scientists don’t need to rush into rapid response vaccine research for this disease.
Baker ended his piece declaring, “If Hantavirus is spreading from person-to-person, then it’s been weaponized, and the evil bioterrorists that are responsible need to be held to account for it, which so far has not happened with Covid.”
Evidence points to COVID having natural origins.
Anthropologist and science writer Wendy Orent, who studies biological weapons and the evolution of infectious disease, said that hantavirus would make a very poor bio weapon. She explained that much like COVID, it kills slowly and has a relatively long incubation period. She also noted that the pattern of spread in this hantavirus outbreak shows no attempt at mass infection.
“No bioweaponeer is going to use a [pathogen] like hantavirus which spreads so sluggishly and which doesn’t have the terrifying power of Marburg or Ebola to make people die rapidly and very quickly in dramatic ways,” she said. “The favorite weapons of the Soviet bioweaponry scientists were anthrax, smallpox, and plague. The whole point of bioweaponry is to terrify your enemies with an explosively spreading or horribly and dramatically lethal disease, not to kill them slowly.”
Another piece, cross-published by Brownstone and the Independent Medical Alliance (formerly known as the FLCCC), a fringe medical group known for its promotion of ivermectin, used public concern over the outbreak to reiterate right-wing criticisms of the public health mainstream. The piece was written by IMA’s president Joseph Varon, MD.
“The hantavirus discussion also exposes an uncomfortable reality: many people no longer trust institutions to provide proportionate information,” it read. “That distrust did not emerge spontaneously. It was built through years of contradictory messaging, exaggerated projections, censorship controversies, and policy reversals during Covid. Once credibility is damaged, every subsequent warning is filtered through skepticism. Ironically, exaggerated communication about low-probability events may weaken public responsiveness when truly dangerous threats eventually emerge. Once lost, institutional trust is challenging to restore.”
The “contradictory messaging” during the early days of the COVID pandemic was a symptom of how the scientific process works, rather than a nefarious plot to deceive the public. As scientists learned more about the novel coronavirus, guidelines on practices like masking and the length of quarantine shifted.
While some in the public health contrarian movement maintained that media hype regarding the Hantavirus outbreak is unfounded, X was rife with hysteria from far-right accounts.
Like others on the far-right, fmr. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to the virus as a bioweapon, and declared vaccines poison:
Chaya Raichik, who posts under the name LibsOfTikTok on X, reposted what appeared to be a 2022 tweet from a self-proclaimed astrologist whose profile only contained 4 tweets, predicting COVID would end in 2023 and hantavirus would emerge in 2026:
MAGA Voice added to the frenzy, first raising the alarm that “23 hantavirus cruise passengers returned home,” then following it up with a post repeatedly declaring “I DON’T CARE ABOUT HANTAVIRUS.”
“These people are one-trick ponies who wave the same narrative about ‘lockdowns’ and mandates in front of them to ward off imaginary authoritarian power grabs as a strategy to make the public more frightened of public health than of actual diseases,” lamented Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine.
Another familiar artifact from the COVID pandemic also made an appearance: Ivermectin, which Greene and physician Mary Talley Bowden recommended on X for treatment of Hantavirus. The anti-parasitic drug was touted by some fringe doctors as a miracle cure for COVID, however, repeated studies have shown no indication that it is an effective treatment for the disease.
Hantavirus is also not a parasite and there is no real evidence pointing to Ivermectin as an effective treatment.
“Ivermectin cannot be assumed to be helpful for hantavirus in the absence of clinical trials in actual humans to assess effectiveness,” pediatrician and cardiologist Frank Han told Important Context.
Han noted that “While there are lab test reports of effectiveness in controlled conditions, there are a great variety of reasons why the lab tests may not directly translate into the real world. While it is appropriate to test the hypothesis, it is inappropriate to simply assert that it works without appropriate evidence.”