CLAIMS SHARED ONLINE that say the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that hantavirus is spreading rapidly across the world are false.

The WHO has not made this claim. The outbreak remains limited with nine confirmed hantavirus cases and two other patients suspected of having the disease.

“World Health Organization says hantavirus is spreading very fast across the world,” read dozens of identical social media posts, shared thousands of times on the social media platforms Facebook and X since 9 May. 

On X, some of these posts are tagged with a Community Notes warning — the platform’s crowdsourced fact-checking programme. Most others do not, even though they have identical wording.

At least a dozen of these untagged posts were published by accounts with blue ticks, indicating that they are signed up for a premium account and are eligible to be paid for making posts that garner high numbers of views.

This system has been criticised for essentially allowing users to monetise the spread of misinformation.

Despite what social media posts say, the WHO has not said that the hantavirus is spreading rapidly across the globe — and such a statement would contradict its official assessment that the hantavirus outbreak posed a low risk to public health.

All the confirmed and suspected cases of the disease were in patients who are believed to have either brought the virus onto a cruise ship, or had contracted it there.

While the head of the WHO told a press conference on 12 May that it should prepare for more hantavirus cases, he also emphasised that there had so far been no signs of a larger outbreak.

The Journal has previously outlined that much of the coverage about the hantavirus has been presented through the lens of the Covid pandemic.

In some cases, this has distorted the impact of the outbreak which has received outsized media coverage due to occurring on a cruise ship, as well as giving a second wind to pandemic-era conspiracy theories that never panned out.

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