hantaviral memes

calling a rat a rat

so, look, “they’re doing the thing again” and trying to talk up some new monkeypox upon our houses. a number of people have asked “are you going to dig into this hantavirus data?” and the answer is essentially “no, probably not.”

why?

because it dignifies this nonsense with more engagement than it deserves and my suspicion is this blows over pretty quickly.

hantavirus is generally not that dangerous in any sort of scalable sense. once you handle the rodents, it spreads poorly, the mortality rates look significantly inflated because the kinds of places it occurs tend to be poor and lacking in many forms of modern medicine.

this is just groundhog day played as public health farce.

i know history is supposed to rhyme and all, but this just looks like plagiarism.

you seriously cannot make this stuff up.

from the looks of things, this is just the same unserious people pushing the same unserious ideas because it’s good politics in the CDC power struggle, because the WHO is out of money, and because moderna has been working on another fake vaccine for a problem no one has and maybe some insiders are gunning for marty at FDA.

they do this in hopes that we forgot about their made up ideas on distancing and supermarket floor stickers and decide to fund them again and let them terrorize us into another mr toad’s wild ride with our lives and livelihoods.

hantavirus is not novel. this disease has 10’s of thousands of cases a year worldwide, it’s not some wildly new new thing.

they just want a hobgoblin.

it’s just more of this:

so that people like this:

can try restore the funding they used to do so much harm back in 2020.

it’s fun watching tedros try to use hanta as a reason the US needs to rejoin the corrupt health circus DBA “the WHO” but the reality is that it’s a stark reminder of why we left.

either he has no idea that this disease lacks pandemic potential and is therefore incompetent or he does know and does not care because he assumes you don’t in which case he’s deceptive and manipulative.

which one makes you want to plunk down some membership money and surrender your sovereignty?

they’d love a super-spreader, but this is not a good candidate. there’s just not enough contagion. hantavirus does not transmit human to human, it’s zoonotic. you get it from rodents. (well, mostly rodent excrement)

the one exception is the ANDV (andes) strain which is what broke out on the MV hondius and everyone is getting the vapors over this, but even that strain has an R0 under 1, so it rapidly sputters out. in the entire history of andes hantavirus, there have been roughly 3,000 total cases and fewer than 300 confirmed instances of human-to-human transmission. the window for person-to-person transmission appears to be extremely short and you need significant direct contact. comparing that to an aerosol pathogen is ridiculous, not that it stops the harangues of health hobbits.

primary spread vector for ANDV is the long tailed pygmy rice rat (oligoryzomys longicaudatus). to stop outbreaks, you generally need an exterminator, not an epidemiologist.

it’s doubtful that what happened on the ship was predominantly human to human transmission (or perhaps human to human at all i don’t know that it’s been documented yet) and to the extent that it was, it’s an outlier and i’d be very interested to see the “sexual contact” data.

this is the most likely explanation:

so before we get carried away here and start acting rashly

let’s let cooler heads (like longtime gatopal™ jay) prevail.

"my message to the american people is please don't worry."

we’ve come a long way and far too many have seen where roads like this can lead:

and we’ve learned how to deal with those who try to take us down them

there has not been a dangerous global pandemic that was not made so by human over and misreaction in the last 150 years.

it’s just not a thing in modern civilization.

just keep calm and carry on.

we don’t need a vaccine for hantavirus, we need one for manipulative public health agents.