Even though health experts say the latest virus to permeate news headline is not a COVID-style emergency in the making, misinformation about the sickness known as hantavirus is infecting the internet and fueling overblown conspiracy theories.
Our truth-squadding of hantavirus dangers focuses on one overwhelming datapoint: there were more than 100-million diagnosed cases of COVID in the United States, part of a global pandemic that brought entire segments of the world to a halt for a few years. So on the face of it, this hantavirus is miniscule.
But that is not preventing a social media firestorm from rolling across websites, much of it ignited by the same bloviates who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories during the COVID pandemic…that experts say this is not.
“No, this is definitely a very different virus than COVID,” said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at University of Illinois-Chicago. “It spreads differently. It is not as efficient a virus to spread as COVID.”
Katrine Wallace has studied hantavirus, a rodent-based virus that turned up on a cruise ship that set sail April 1. At least two passengers, a Dutch couple, died from the hantavirus and some of the 150 other passengers were exposed. A few became ill.
Nearly 20 Americans were among those evacuated and transferred to hospitals in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta on Monday morning.
But even as hantavirus is far less menacing than COVID, and not nearly as contagious, UIC’s Wallace said the voices of doom, dire falsehoods and misinformation that germinated during COVID, are sprouting again.
“So my personal fear level is about a one out of ten for this that anyone in the general public is going to get on this strain of hantavirus,” Wallace told NBC 5 Investigates. “Most cases of this are spread from rodents to people. It’s very unusual and has to be under specific circumstances to spread from person to person. So most people that get this disease will get it directly from rodents. And we actually have hantavirus in the United States already. We’ve had about 900 cases since we started tracking it in 1993.”
GOUDIE: “So how do we get from what it is to all of the various conspiracy theories and kind of wild accusations and storylines that are now out there?
WALLACE: “There’s basically three main things that I’ve noticed. One is that health misinformation now spreads almost immediately after outbreak news breaks.
So basically, misinformation no longer behaves like isolated rumors that kind of slowly gain traction. Instead, there is now more of a standing online ecosystem that’s kind of ready to attach itself to any kind of health story within hours. And we did see that happen with this.
And another thing is that the claims that people are making are not really internally consistent. Like for example, um, the narratives kind of contradicted each other. Like they said it was caused, people said it was caused by COVID vaccines, that it was a pharmaceutical conspiracy. Then you saw other people saying that it was a hoax and it wasn’t even real at all.
Or people saying it was real, but it was treatable by Ivermectin, which is not the case.
So it doesn’t even seem to matter that they don’t make sense.
People will still spread all of them together.”
Wallace said many of the people posting falsehoods are the same as during COVID and so is their motivation. She said it could be political, financial or raw power, and sometimes all three of those are connected.
