Hantavirus is a warning. The Trump admin isn't listening

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Hantavirus is a warning. The Trump admin isn’t listening
The Dutch cruise ship incident probably isn’t the next pandemic. That doesn’t mean we’re risk-free from outbreaks

By Troy Farah
National Affairs Editor
Published May 11, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) A week ago, most people had probably never heard of hantavirus. Now, millions of people are likely wishing they hadn’t. Judging from a slew of panicked social media posts and endless versions of the same explainers on “how worried should you be?” there is a genuine fear that we could be in for another pandemic. It’s not hard to understand why people freaking out. Even the virus name sounds scary, haunting.

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The fact that the outbreak was on a cruise ship, one of the first places COVID-19 started to spread back in early 2020, is giving tons of people déjà vu. But besides both being viruses, the similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and hantavirus actually aren’t close. They infect in different ways and are classed in entirely different phylums, meaning they are not remotely related. Furthermore, hantavirus has been around for decades, it is not spread quickly or easily between people and those who catch it display symptoms, unlike COVID, which can spread between folks unknowingly. The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both report that the current risk to the global population from this event is low.

That doesn’t mean people’s concern is exactly misguided. Although the COVID pandemic is essentially over, it doesn’t mean we aren’t still coping with lingering trauma from global shutdowns and the deaths of an estimated 7 million people worldwide. Yes, SARS-2 is still spreading and maiming people today, but widespread immunity from past infections and vaccines has made the virus much less deadly. There’s always the possibility that SARS-2 could mutate into a new strain that causes a huge surge of cases, something that happened countless times over the last six years, but for now, things are relatively calm. It’s still not great that we let it rip, especially given how long COVID disables so many, but for better or worse, we added it to the list of preventable diseases like flu and HIV that we let kill some people every year and just shrug it off as a society.

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While acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya has said hantavirus is not COVID — and he’s probably right — the general response from the agency is not instilling much confidence we’re prepared for bigger, more serious pathogens.

“It’s very much, we hope, under control,” President Donald Trumps said on Thursday when asked about hantavirus. But for many in public health, hope isn’t enough. Experts have expressed concern that many Trump admin officials who are tasked with ensuring there isn’t another COVID — like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services — are missing from the public eye while the WHO picks up the slack. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/11/hantavirus-is-a-warning-the-trump-admin-isnt-listening/