AS DAILY NEWS emerges of a virus causing a quarantine on the high seas, many people have sought to explain the ongoing hantavirus breakout through a lens they are more familiar with: the Covid pandemic.

But trying to understand hantavirus – an older, rarer and far more fatal disease – with reference to Covid, one of the most contagious and unexpected virus outbreaks in the last century, has led to distortions in how people talk and think about it.

The outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius has left three people dead. Around four other cases have been confirmed on the ship, as well as a number of suspected cases that have led to people isolating as a precaution, both onboard the ship and in some cases on land.

For most people, comparisons to Covid frame the outbreak on a cruise ship as having more in common with a worldwide pandemic than the majority of infectious diseases, scores of which have active cases in Ireland, that stay contained.

But for fringe groups, echoes of Covid are an opportunity to replay debunked theories about planned pandemics, bioweapons and killer vaccinations that had largely been starved of rhetorical fuel in the years following the lifting of lockdowns.

‘Covid 2.0’?

On social media, popular posts directly refer to the hantavirus outbreak in terms like “Covid 2.0”, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who, in an X post seen more than 525,000 times, said the latest outbreak was intentionally launched by “globalists”.

“EU Tells Citizens ‘MASK UP,’ Stoking Hysteria!,” Jones’s 7 May post falsely states.

Jones mis-cited an article in The Daily Star newspaper that said people who were in close contact with potential hantavirus victims should “mask up”, as well as people planning to clean up rat faeces, which is the main vector for the disease.

However, it is not just fringe figures who have used the Covid 2.0 term, or who have made references to the last pandemic.

“Can somebody tell me what is this Hantavirus?” former NFL champion James Harrison wrote in a 5 May X post. “I can’t take another Covid pandemic.”

Are there reasons to fear the hantavirus outbreak is just the opening bell of a worldwide event like we saw with Covid? Not really.

Both diseases are caused by viruses, and both can be fatal. Beyond that, drawing similarities becomes tougher.

According to the World Health Organization, there are estimated to be between 10,000 and 100,000 cases of humans infected with hantavirus each year.

Ireland’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre notes that hantaviruses are not found naturally here. Cases have previously been detected in Ireland, very rarely, but only in people who were infected in other countries.

However, while many hantavirus cases are mild, the strain found on the cruise ship is a more fatal subtype known as the Andes strain.

While most strains of hantavirus are only spread through the excretions of rodents, the Andes strain can spread from person to person.

However, even then, human-to-human transmission is rare and usually occurs in situations where people are living in very close contact with each other.

Both the hantavirus and the news about it this week spread for largely the same reason: the disease broke out on a cruise ship.

Nevertheless, confusion over whether hantavirus could pass from one person to another has helped to stoke fears about it, with some online commentators misleadingly saying its spread signalled a worrying mutation in how the virus travels.

Assessing risk

How worried should you be about the hantavirus? 

An opinion piece by epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers in Thursday’s New York Times is accompanied by a handy flowchart that seeks to answer this.

It begins by asking: “Are you on board the MV Hondius cruise ship now?”

If you answer yes, the flowchart tells you that it is entirely appropriate to worry.

If not, you are encouraged to move on to further questions, such as whether you were recently on the MV Hondius, or on a flight with someone who took ill on that cruise ship.

The last question reads: “Are you around wild rodent faeces, urine or saliva?”

Answering no to all of these questions leads to the conclusion, in calming green, that you shouldn’t worry.

In her article, Rivers notes that the risk would change if a mutation was detected, or if there were cases unconnected to the cruise.

Until then, her outlook mirrors the official position from the World Health Organization: the risk to the global population is “low”.

There are scores of infectious diseases currently present in Ireland, some of them fatal.

Globally, there are multiple disease outbreaks each year, and tens of thousands of cases involving other hantavirus strains.

It is impossible to predict the future course of a disease outbreak, but there is little to indicate that a hantavirus outbreak at sea should loom a larger threat than these.

That is, unless you assume that it is just part of something bigger, more sinister, and significantly less believable.

Conspiracy theories

Almost all the conspiracy theories about hantavirus shared this week mirror ones that occurred during the Covid pandemic. However, while they can all be said to have their origin in Covid, one theory has taken this literally.

“HANTAVIRUS is a side effect of the Covid ‘vaccine’,” reads a post on X that has been viewed more than 102,200 times since being posted on 7 May.

“The COVID vaccine is going to transform into a virus?” reads another that was viewed more than 2,700,000 times. “It’s one of 1,233 listed side effects.”

Both these posts are from “blue tick” accounts, meaning that their content is boosted onto people’s feeds and they can receive money for the number of views they accumulate.

The posts are currently untagged by Community Notes — X’s crowdsourced scheme to prevent misinformation.

The claims in the posts are based on a document that supposedly shows recorded events in people who had received the Pfizer vaccine for Covid — such “event reports” were commonly used during the Covid pandemic to mislead.

These are reports of any medically relevant event, ranging from a rash to a car crash, that occur to people after they receive a vaccine. Sometimes these are relevant, but often they are random coincidences. The reports should be statistically analysed for any unexpected spikes worth investigating.

 As billions of doses of vaccines were given out, a huge number of such events were reported. However, this is more a result of billions of potential data points being collected than a sign that something was being caused by the vaccine itself.

More commonly, conspiracy theories online claim that the outbreak of hantavirus was pre-planned, based on the most spurious of evidence.

“HANTA “VIRUS” PANIC CAMPAIGN ALREADY LOOKS PRE-PLANNED,” begins one such post with more than 384,300 views.

“In 2024, Moderna quietly partners with Korea University on an mRNA-based Hantavirus vaccine…” they begin.

Other posts on X suggesting that Moderna’s work on a vaccine is evidence that the hantavirus was planned have been viewed millions of times — again by “blue tick” accounts and with no Community Notes attached.

It’s not clear what the reasoning is here, though these theories do echo claims during the pandemic that the Covid vaccines were created too quickly, and therefore the disease must have been pre-planned. It may also imply that Moderna caused the outbreak to sell their vaccine (which is not available and is still being tested).

In either case, developing a vaccine against a disease that already affects tens of thousands of people each year is not proof of a conspiracy. Moderna is currently working on many vaccines, including for the flu, Covid, and even for cancers — that hardly means that they are planning to cause these diseases.

Another version of the claim that the Andes strain hantavirus was planned is based on Exercise Polaris II, “a 2-day high-level simulation exercise, based around an outbreak of a fictional new bacterium spreading across the world,” carried out by the World Health Organization.

The simulation was really carried out.

However, the similarities between the exercise and the outbreak on the cruise ship were not “shocking” as some popular social media posts claimed.

The Polaris II exercise simulated a “fictional new bacterium spreading across the world”, as opposed to an already known virus infecting eight people on a contained boat.

Some commentators brought attention to how the WHO exercise talked about some of the same methods that were used to tackle the hantavirus outbreak — such as “early detection” and “contact tracing across borders” — however these are simply standard methods of managing infectious diseases.

Many posts assert simply that the hantavirus is a “scam”, the same term which was used widely by conspiracy theorists during the Covid pandemic — or as they often refer to it: the Scamdemic.

However, the term “scam” meant different things depending on who was saying it. Some meant that the disease wasn’t real; others, that the disease was real but manmade and released by the government. Some meant that the government didn’t release the disease, but made it out to be more dangerous than it really was.

In some cases, the use of the term “scam” meant that Covid was seen as a real, dangerous disease that no one controlled, but that governments took advantage of the situation to enact unending lockdowns, or administer nanobots in vaccines, or do something else undefined but nefarious involving 5G.

Similarly, posts about the hantavirus being a “scam” have spread online in recent days, often accompanied by people saying they would refuse to take a hantavirus vaccine.

In some cases, neither vaccines nor the hantavirus needed to be explicitly named.

“Don’t comply,” Sarah Palin said in an X post seen more than 5,100,000 times since being published on 7 May. Her previous posts had been about vaccines being dangerous and punishing Anthony Fauci, who led the US response to Covid. “This time, just don’t,”she implored.

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