Conspiracy theorists, health advocates, and grifters have already begun promoting wild claims about the hantavirus outbreak that began in MV. Hondiusan Atlantic cruise ship.
Some conspiracy theorists compared the outbreak to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying it was another attempt to control the world’s population, while others pushed the false story that the Covid-19 vaccine caused the hantavirus. Many others have promoted ivermectin as a treatment, using the incident as a way to sell emergency medical supplies with an insecticide commonly used as a dewormer for horses.
In recent days, many of these same conspiracy theorists have promoted baseless and counterintuitive claims that the entire incident was a false flag orchestrated by Israel.
Conspiracy theories flooding social media in response to headlines are nothing new, but what is remarkable about those pushed by the hantavirus outbreak is how they resonate with the conspiracy theories promoted during the Covid-19 outbreak.
“One of the most notable changes since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic is how quickly fake news now organizes itself around emerging outbreaks,” Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, told WIRED.
“Within hours of the first hantavirus headlines, social media accounts were already promoting ivermectin, claiming an outbreak of Covid vaccines, and warning of a nonexistent hantavirus vaccine. The claims themselves were often controversial, but that controversy no longer seems to be slowing their spread.”
As soon as hantavirus outbreaks begin to make headlines around the world, conspiracy theorists and detractors jump into action, spreading dangerously misinformed claims and, of course, trying to sell people ivermectin.
“Ivermectin should work against it,” Mary Talley Bowden wrote in X. Bowden, a physician, is a prominent promoter of medical misinformation who promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and administered ivermectin to a Covid-19 patient. Hours after his first post on Hantavirus, he followed up and said he was selling ivermectin to Texans. Bowden did not respond to a request for comment.
Her post, which has been viewed 4 million times, was shared by former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who added that vitamin D and zinc will help fight the virus. Greene even said that the lack of a vaccine for Covid-19 allowed him to somehow “develop natural immunity” against the hantavirus.
Greene separately claimed, without proof, that the pharmaceutical company Moderna used the virus on purpose to allow them to make money from making a vaccine against the hantavirus. Greene did not respond to a request for comment.
Some prominent health advocates of disinformation have raised the claims of ivermectin, including Simone Gold, founder of the Covid denial group America’s Frontline Doctors, and Peter McCullough, a disinformation peddler who promoted the idea of ”sudden death” about the Covid-19 vaccine, who lied that those who got the shot were at risk.
McCullough is also the chief scientific officer of The Wellness Company, which has been described as “Goop for the GOP.” The company used the hantavirus outbreak to promote a $325 “Contagion Emergency Kit” that includes both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
All the false claims and posts about ivermectin gained enough traction on the Internet that the World Health Organization responded by saying that no research suggests that ivermectin is an effective treatment for hantavirus.
Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, have been pushing the baseless idea that a side effect of Covid vaccines includes hantavirus infection.
